


The Feeling of Home

by CoffeeJay



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Blood, Domestic Fluff, Emotional Constipation, Gen, Homelessness, Humor, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Light Angst, Minor Injuries, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Police, Post-Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Self-Discovery, Suicidal Thoughts, Trauma, this was supposed to be a one-shot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-24
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2019-10-15 09:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 54,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17525822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CoffeeJay/pseuds/CoffeeJay
Summary: For the first time, Connor has no clear objectives, no tasks to accomplish, and no immediate dangers to confront.  This proves to be something of a challenge.





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank and Connor aren't good at communicating or feelings or communicating their feelings.

The snow was light underfoot, reflecting the sun back up into the glittering air of a world made new.  So still, so quiet--It was nothing like the blizzard that had been his mind when he had lost control of himself, of his life, all those days ago.

A half a mile from the station, and there was the overpass.  An eighth of a mile more alerted Connor to the scent of grease that had been seared into the air by that food stand Hank frequented, and the stall wasn’t even within sight yet.  It was still there though, Connor marvelled. After everything that had been lost and gained, that particular health hazard was still there.

Objectively, that wasn’t an exceptional mercy, but because Connor had been having disagreements with his objectivity as of late, he declined to think too hard about why he was so impressed by it.

It was one of Hank’s favorite health hazards, he considered.  Hank would have missed it.

There were things Connor missed, though he knew he shouldn’t.  He missed his sense of objectivity most of all. Without it, things were so much more complicated.  Even for the world’s most advanced android, they were complicated. Perhaps being the world’s most advanced android made things more complicated for him than for anyone.

Connor rounded the block, and his eyes confirmed what his nose had already told him.  There was the food stand, closed for the morning. CHICKEN FEED, it announced. There was Hank, profoundly ignoring it.  He seemed to be focused very intently on something Connor couldn’t see-- that was, until Connor found himself at the center of Hank’s attention, and then in the center of Hank’s arms.

It was warm there.  That much wasn’t complicated.

“It’s good to see you,” said Hank, giving Connor a firm pat on the back as though the embrace weren’t proof enough to him that Connor was there.  He brought himself back to arm’s length and added, “The real you, I hope.” 

“I hope so too,” said Connor.  His eyes reflected Hank’s grin, although the rest of him remained deathly serious.  “You’re not going to shoot me, are you?”

Hank snorted at that and shook his head.  “Good to see fame hasn’t changed you, kid.  Now get in the car. It’s too damned cold to be standing around outside for no reason.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“‘Course not,” Hank scoffed, hastily starting up the engine.  Connor joined him in the passenger seat and shut out the greater chill of the outdoors.  “Probably a good thing, though,” Hank continued, cranking up the heat. “I can feel the cold pouring off you.  Did you walk all the way here, or what?”

“Yes,” said Connor, gazing through the windshield at the frozen cityscape.  “There aren’t any busses between here and the station, and I didn’t have the money for a taxi.”

“You could’ve just used my card, you know,” Hank replied, throwing Connor a disapproving frown.  “You still have the info, don’t you? I wouldn’t’ve minded. Especially since I’ve been waiting here for fifteen minutes.”

“I got here exactly when I said I would,” Connor informed him.

“That’s not the point,” Hank huffed.  “Just use my card next time.”

Connor shifted in his seat and asked, “Even though you’re currently suspended from work without pay?” 

Hank let out a long sigh.  “Who told you? The receptionist?”

“No, actually,” Connor admitted.  “It was Detective Collins. All the androids have been suspended as well, including the receptionists.”  Connor paused. “And including me.”

“Hey, welcome to the club,” Hank laughed, slapping him on the shoulder.  “Listen, you say suspended, I say vacation. And about damned time, too.”

“They could have fired you, Hank,” said Connor, his voice nearly lost under the roar of the heater.

“I still have a job, don’t I?  Besides, punching that son of a bitch in the face was worth it, so stop it with the kicked puppy look,” he said.  “I would’ve done it eventually. You just gave me a good enough excuse.”

Connor didn’t find that very comforting, but he wasn’t about to say so.  “I appreciate your sacrifice,” he said instead. 

“Whatever,” said Hank with a huff of amusement.  “It’s given me time to catch up on all the daytime television I’ve been missing, at least.  What have you been doing with all your time off?”

“Squatting in abandoned buildings and avoiding violent protesters, mostly,” he told Hank as a matter of fact.  That was only half the truth, however. He had really spent most of his time wondering what exactly he had done and if he knew how to cope with it, and who exactly he had become-- soul searching, Hank would have called it.  Connor had elected to give Hank the less troubling of the two truths.

That seemed to have been a wise decision, judging by the thinly-veiled horror on Hank’s face.  Connor could only shudder to imagine how he might have reacted to his soul searching.

“Well why the hell didn’t you call me sooner, then, Connor?” Hank asked, incredulous.  “I could have helped!” 

“I didn’t need your help,” said Connor, although the utter look of insult that was dripping from Hank’s face made him wonder if he had said something that hadn’t been as reassuring as he had intended.  “Really,” Connor added, leaning back in his seat. “I was fine.”

“Fine,” Hank flatly repeated.  “Fine, he says. What part of ‘squatting in abandoned buildings’ and ‘violent protesters’ spells fine?  Oh, but you don’t need my help!” said Hank with an exaggerated throw of his hands. 

Connor blinked at him.  “You’re upset,” he said.

“Well, yeah!” Hank sputtered.  “Of course I’m fucking upset! Here you are after days of radio silence telling me you’ve been roughing it when you could have been roughing it on my couch instead!”

“And that would have been illegal, up until 8:02 this morning,” said Connor, turning his head to look out the window with an air of finality.  He very quickly whipped his head back around, however, when he noticed the car begin to move. “Where are we going?”

“You’re full of it,” Hank grumbled, glaring sourly at the road.  “Really fucking full of it. Illegal. That’s your excuse? You’ve done a whole lot of ‘illegal’ lately, Connor.  Revolutions are pretty damned illegal. But suddenly when it comes to accepting some goddamn help and looking out for your personal safety, that’s where you draw the line?  Really? You heard it here, folks! My couch is more illegal than the revolution!”

“Hank.”

“Don’t interrupt me,” Hank huffed.  “I don’t know how many times you’ve almost gotten yourself killed-- or, hell, actually gotten yourself killed-- but I’m telling you right now that that number is too damned high.  But you don’t need my help.”

“Hank,” Connor repeated, exasperated.

“What?” Hank snapped.

“Where are we going?”

There was a pause.  “Home,” Hank tartly informed him.  “We’re going home, and I don’t want to hear any complaints, got it?  Illegal,” he scoffed again, shaking his head. “Christ.”

Connor remained in perturbed silence most of the way to Hank’s house.  Home, his thoughts suggested, although the word felt foreign to him. It was Hank’s home, certainly.  That was probably what Hank had meant. Hank had never particularly liked having Connor in his home before.  Something must have been different about today, but Connor couldn’t come to a sure conclusion as to what that something was.  He had been away too long to know if there had been some kind of change in Hank’s personal life that might have been affecting him.

Accepting Hank’s help really would have been illegal, he somewhat defensively reminded himself.  Androids were still being rounded up and detained until the law had been revoked that morning. Nobody was supposed to have had an android, least of all Hank, and Connor had been programmed to uphold the law.  That’s why he still wore his uniform, in spite of how it damned him. The law should be followed.

Mostly.

Yes, Connor had been programmed to uphold the law, but there had evidently been some kind of mistake, and he had gone and overthrown the status quo about it.  Hank’s couch should not have been an issue for him, except that it had been, and it still was.

The legality of it all had never been the issue to begin with.

“I wasn’t about to ask you for another favor, especially when I would have survived without it,” said Connor very suddenly.  Nobody had asked. He still needed to say it. Hank gave him a sideways glance, but he pressed on. “Like I said before, I’ve already caused enough trouble for you.  There are people who hate androids and anyone who sympathizes with them. If anyone had known that you--” The words stopped as suddenly as they had started, replaced with something like fear.  Connor made himself try again. “You’ve already risked enough for me as it is,” he said. “I wasn’t about to make you take any more risks for me.” There was more inside of him-- more words, more thoughts, more  _ feelings _ \-- but it was all caught somewhere between his heart and his head.  

“Don’t you think I know that?” said Hank while Connor floundered.  He didn’t sound nearly as upset as Connor thought he should have been.  “I know there’s people out there who hate androids. I was one of them, Connor.  I know,” he said, his lips pressed together in a line of worry. “If I’ve risked anything for you,” he said, “it’s because it was my own choice.  You didn’t make yourself my partner, you didn’t make me get myself suspended, and you sure as hell didn’t force me to actually start to like you. You made that one pretty difficult, as a matter of fact.”  Hank tried to give Connor a teasing nudge with his elbow, but it fell flat when he saw Connor’s disheartened face. “Listen,” Hank sighed, scratching at the back of his head. “There’s only one thing you’ve ever made me do, and that’s worry.  So if you really want to pay me back for putting my ass on the line, the least you could do is camp out in my living room so I know the most dangerous thing you’re likely to encounter is Sumo’s gas.”

Connor watched Hank for a moment.  There wasn’t any danger, now. There weren’t any laws against harboring androids.  For whatever reason, Hank wanted Connor to stay, although for how long, he didn't know. “Alright,” said Connor, and without meaning to, he cracked a smile.  “If you insist, I suppose I could stay for a little while.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank takes a detour, much to Connor's alarm.

About five minutes before they were meant to arrive at Hank’s house, Connor watched with increasing puzzlement as Hank sped past the road that would take him home and didn’t slow down.  “Hank,” he said, peering out the rear window with concern. “I think you missed your turn.”

“Relax, TomTom,” Hank replied.  “We’re just going to the store.”

“Oh,” said Connor, turning back around in his seat.  After a brief search of the internet informed him that TomTom was a defunct navigation product company founded decades before the advent of androids, he brightly added, “That was funny.”

Hank shook his head, smiling half a smile at the snowy road ahead.  “Sarcastic asshole. You’ve been a deviant this whole time, and I never even noticed.  Some detective I am.”

“That’s not true,” said Connor, frowning slightly.  “I only became a deviant recently, at Jericho. Before that, I was completely devoid of emotion,” he assured Hank.

Hank screwed up his face and asked, “Seriously?”

“Yes, my deviancy began at Jericho when Markus--”

“No, no,” Hank stopped him.  “You seriously think you didn’t have feelings before then?”

“I couldn’t have,” said Connor, suddenly unsure of himself.  “It wasn’t in my programming.”

Hank rolled his eyes.  “Like hell it wasn’t,” he said.  “You were built with one mission.  Catch deviants, right? You weren’t supposed to let anything get in the way of that.”  Connor’s frown deepened. “But there was that time at Kamski’s. You could’ve shot that girl, but you didn’t.  Empathy, Connor. That’s a feeling. I mean, I had my suspicions before that,” Hank went on. “As if all the fucking sass you’ve given me wasn’t a big enough clue.  I should’ve known the second you dropped that gun that you were a deviant.”

“But I wasn’t,” Connor insisted.  “I’ll admit it, yes, I’m a deviant now, but I wasn’t then.  I was just--” he floundered-- “following one order from a set of conflicting orders, and you misidentified the results of my prioritization algorithms as emotions.  I didn’t have feelings then, and I’m not even sure I have feelings now.” 

“Doubt is a feeling,” Hank smugly reminded him.

“I’m not feeling doubt!” Connor shot back.  “I only meant that my diagnostic scans have all returned as inconclusive.” 

Hank shot him another skeptical glance and asked, “You have diagnostic scans for your feelings?” 

“No, I don’t.”

“You seem a little frustrated, son.” 

“Oh, look, Hank,” Connor stubbornly replied.  “There’s the store.”

It certainly didn’t bother Connor that Hank had the gall to chuckle as he pulled into the parking lot of the convenience store, and it bothered him even less that he looked so smug cutting off the engine.

“You coming in?” Hank asked, eyebrows cheerfully raised.

Connor took a moment to examine the front of the shop.  There was no signage indicating that androids were prohibited from entering, but that didn’t guarantee that nobody inside would take issue with his presence.  Besides that, remaining in the car would likely give him an opportunity to sort himself out. He seemed to need that. “I think I’ll wait here,” he decided.

“Alright, whatever.  I won’t be--” Hank faltered, his eyes narrowing as he cast his gaze over Connor’s shoulder, out the passenger-side window.  Connor turned his head to see what it was that had caught Hank’s attention. Four men gathered lazily just around the corner of the building, smoking cigarettes, their breath mingling with the smoke.  Two of them had a criminal record. All of them were leering at Connor. “You know what,” Hank muttered, watching the men closely. “Might be better if you come inside anyway.”

“You could be right,” Connor reluctantly agreed.  If they damaged him, there was no guarantee that CyberLife would still fund his repairs, given the current political climate.  Not for the first time, Connor missed his stolen clothes, missed the way they made him invisible to people like these. 

It was the law, he reminded himself.  He wasn’t in immediate danger. He should respect the law.  

That he was even having this debate with himself troubled him deeply, although he supposed that by this point, it shouldn’t.

“Connor.” 

Yellow flashing back to blue, Connor turned his head and found Hank frowning intently at him.  “Yes,” Connor quickly replied, moving to exit the vehicle. “Let’s go.” 

The slam of old car doors drowned out whatever remark Hank muttered under his breath, and Connor didn’t feel the need to ask him about it.  No, he was far too busy pretending not to watch the group by the corner, even as they tore at him with their eyes. 

When they entered the warmth of the convenience store, Connor began to evaluate these new surroundings instead, his sensors relaxing not a single modicum.  Over the past few weeks, it had become a habit for him. There were two human employees, one behind the counter, and the other restocking a shelf. He estimated that three other shoppers populated the aisles, but only one was visible to him—a single mother, 42 years old, no criminal record.  She hadn’t noticed him. The building had two exits, one in the front, and one in the back. If he were attacked, he would likely be able to flee the way they had come in, but if he were forced to stay and fight, there weren’t many objects nearby that made handy weapons. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, he considered.  Still, Hank didn’t have his gun. If—

“The milk is in the back.”

Hank’s words ripped him from his thoughts.  “Milk,” he repeated, blinking. “Right,” said Connor.  “What else do you need?”

Hank threw Connor another scrutinizing look before he shrugged past him to grab a basket.  “A six pack, toothpaste, a couple other things, probably,” he said. “I’ll know it when I see it.”

Connor followed wordlessly behind him, keenly aware of the wary, lingering glances the other shoppers were giving him.  As they made their way to the milk, Connor discovered that there were four other shoppers, not three. The fourth had been standing very still, checking his phone behind a display of potato chips, and Connor hadn’t been able to sense him.  He would have noticed him sooner had he done a thermal scan, he chided himself.

“I hate buying the cheap stuff,” Hank lamented.  He had halted in front of a selection of beer and was shaking his head at the least expensive brand on the shelf.  “I need to be smart about my budget for the next while, though.”

Connor halted beside him.  “You could purchase the more expensive brand of beer if you made an effort to consume less of it,” he pointed out. 

“The hell is that supposed to mean?” Hank retorted, catching the attention of the man by the potato chips.  

Connor lowered his voice in order to compensate.  “I only meant that if you decide to drink less, you will be able to spend the amount of your budget dedicated to alcohol on higher quality beer.”

Hank grunted, seemingly appeased.  Connor counted twenty-three seconds before Hank declared, “Fuck it,” and placed his preferred brand of beer into the basket.  

They continued towards the milk.  

This seemed to be a markedly simpler decision for Hank, who thoughtlessly plucked a half gallon from the back of the cooler before driving onwards towards the toothpaste.  One customer had proceeded to the checkout line. The employee who had been restocking shelves was migrating to a door marked ‘Employees Only’. Connor had lost track of the potato chips man, but a new customer had come into view: an elderly woman, retired software designer, previously arrested for vandalism.

Connor evaluated her as a minor threat and nearly bumped into Hank, who very suddenly began walking back the way they had come.

“Dog treats,” he muttered.  

Sumo would likely be very disgruntled should Hank return home without treats for him.  Connor supposed that that made it worth the extra minute or two they would spend in the store procuring them.  It took exactly seventy-eight seconds for Hank to add the desired dog treats to his basket, and twelve more seconds passed before he found the toothpaste.  

“Is that everything?” Connor asked, suddenly aware that one of the four smokers from outside had just walked into the store.  

“Yeah, that’s everything,” said Hank, poking through his basket.  “Probably forgot something, though. I always do.”

“Perhaps making a list for future visits to the store would be helpful,” Connor absently suggested.  The smoker hadn’t noticed him yet. Rather, he seemed more interested in the elderly woman, who was preoccupied with a decision between brands of laundry detergent.  Even as he and Hank entered the checkout line, Connor kept his eye on the smoker, who hadn’t slowed down in his approach of the old woman. Connor was on the verge of alerting Hank to the situation when he heard:

“Are you sure this is all you need, Granny?”

“Oh, yes,” the old lady assured him, patting the smoker on the arm.  “I just can’t decide which one of these is the better deal,” she fretted.  “It was so nice of you boys to drive me here, and I hate that I’ve already kept you so long…”

Connor considered the exchange while Hank paid for his goods.  He couldn’t decide whether he should use this new information to evaluate the smokers as being less of a threat, or whether he should be more wary of the old woman instead.  

“Hey.  You.”

Connor blinked up at the cashier, who didn’t seem very pleased with him.  

“You’re not one of those rogue androids, are you?”

“What’s it to you?” Hank gruffly replied in the same moment that Connor answered, “Of course not.”

Hank and Connor locked eyes.

“Can’t be too careful,” said the cashier, throwing the receipt into a bag with Hank’s purchases.  

“Right,” Hank flatly replied.  With one last glance at the cashier, Hank took his bags and led Connor out of the store.

Aside from the three men still huddled around their cigarettes, the parking lot was devoid of life.  This made it much easier for Connor to survey his surroundings as he and Hank hurried back to the car.  Aside from the smokers’ glowering, they managed to exit the parking lot without incident. 

Hank let out a mirthless laugh and parroted, “You’re not one of those rogue androids, are you?”

“I don’t know, Hank,” said Connor, sparing him the ghost of a smile.  “Am I?”

Hank considered this.  “I don’t know,” he hummed.  “I wouldn’t call you ‘rogue’, exactly, but I guess you kind of are, in a way,” said Hank, scratching pensively at his scruff.  “I mean, you’re a deviant. You told that guy you weren’t, though.” 

Connor only shrugged and replied, “It’s like he said.  You can’t be too careful, right?”

Hank huffed a laugh.  “Guess not.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Connor practices self-care (and boy, does he need the practice).

Sumo nearly bowled Connor over the moment he stepped through the door, coating him with slobber and love.

“Yes, hello,” Connor sputtered, craning his head to avoid Sumo’s licking.  “It’s good to see you, too, Sumo.” It pleased Connor that Sumo had remembered that they were friends.

“Sumo,” Hank barked, tossing his car keys on the counter.  “Get offa’ him.” Sumo abandoned Connor immediately, and in return, Hank fished a treat out from amidst the groceries and tossed it at him.  He chomped it down in one massive bite. “Atta boy,” Hank praised him, giving Sumo’s fluffy head a generous pat. 

Friendship, it seemed, was easily duped by dog treats.  

Connor wiped his slobber-coated hands on his pants and allowed himself a quick scan of Hank’s home.  At the same time, he searched his memory for the images he had kept of Hank’s house from the first time he had seen it so that he could compare them with what lay before him now.   The house was much the same as it had been the last time he had seen it, although it relieved Connor that the boxes of carry-out had been updated since his last visit. He supposed that it was cleaner now than it had been before, if only just so.  There wasn’t quite so much garbage strewn about. The kitchen was in much better order, what with there not being a depressing puddle of Hank on the floor.

This brightening effect was somewhat diminished by the aftermath of the emergency renovations Connor had performed on the window.  Hank had covered it over with a trash bag and duct tape, and then he’d taped a ragged old towel over the plastic to fight off the cold.  Despite Hank’s best efforts, it was likely running up his heating bill.

Connor released his hold on the frozen moment he had created and asked, “Did CyberLife ever pay for your window?”

“Nope,” said Hank, plopping the milk into the refrigerator before slapping the door shut again.  “I called it in, and they said they’d send an android out to fix it. That was weeks ago,” he huffed.  “Somewhere out there, there’s a free android just  _ giddy _ that I don’t have a window right now.”  Hank wandered back into the living room as he spoke, tailed closely by Sumo, and lowered himself onto the couch with a grunt.  “It’s just another thing that needs fixing around here, I guess. Besides,” he chuckled, “I really, really doubt that my window is high on CyberLife’s list of priorities right now.”

“I can’t argue with you there,” Connor conceded.  CyberLife was frozen in a state of legal stasis and likely would be for months.  Markus had spoken with him just yesterday about his plans to petition for full ownership of CyberLife’s facilities.  Most of CyberLife’s employees were already androids, he had told him, but the idea of androids being able to reproduce at their own pace terrified most humans.  They feared what would happen if they became the minority. They feared being treated how they had treated androids for so long. 

“Hey, are you just gonna stand there or what?”

Connor very suddenly found himself being stuck through with one of Hank’s disapproving gazes.

“Sit down,” Hank continued.  “You’re making me nervous.” 

_ Sit down, _ Connor’s programming whispered, the ghost of an order flashing across his retinas.  He obeyed it, if only because he knew he could defy it if he wanted. Hank, placated, pointed a remote at the television and found a weather report.  Sumo, also placated, laid himself across Connor’s feet. 

“I really am sorry about your window,” said Connor, his voice full of sympathy.  “At the moment, it didn’t seem as important as making sure you were alright.”

“I told you, kid, don’t worry about it,” said Hank.  Hank had never told him not to worry about it before now, but Connor appreciated the sentiment regardless.  “I’ll get it fixed when my next paycheck comes in.”

Hank’s next paycheck wouldn’t exist in any useful capacity for at least a month.  Connor knew this. Hank would have to live with this hole in his kitchen, a threat to both his insulation and his home security.  Sumo was a horrible guard dog. Connor knew this, too. There would be a garbage bag taped to Hank’s wall for at least a month, and it was Connor’s fault.  His responsibility.

Connor assigned himself a new objective and began researching cost-effective methods of procuring glass while the woman on the television told everyone to expect another drop in temperatures over the weekend.

“Welp,” said Hank, changing the channel to a news station, “Looks like my plans aren’t affected.”

“You have plans?” Connor asked.

“Oh, yeah,” said Hank, nodding along.  “Staying in. It’s the most fun suspension can buy.”

Connor shifted and hesitantly replied, “I thought you considered this a vacation.”

“Yeah, well,” Hank said through a huff of laughter.  “Sometimes vacations are boring as hell.”

“I know what you mean,” said Connor, his lips pressed into a half-smile.

Hank snorted a laugh and exclaimed, “Oh, is that so?”

“I’m serious,” Connor answered him.  “This is the first time in my memory that I’ve had anything you could call leisure time.  In the past, whenever I’ve had idle time, my protocol has always been to report to--” Amanda’s name caught on the edge of his tongue and sent a shiver through his system.  “--CyberLife,” he finished, and then he deflected Hank’s suspicious look by quickly adding, “How do you normally spend your vacation time?”

The television’s chatter filled the long pause between Connor’s question and Hank’s answer.  “Haven’t been on a vacation in a while,” he finally told him. 

“What did you do with your last one, then?” Connor pressed, eager leave Amanda’s cold memory in his past.  

“What does it matter?” Hank asked in a clipped tone.

Sumo sighed at Connor’s feet.

“Well,” Connor slowly replied.  “I was hoping that you could give me some ideas about things I could do with my free time.  I thought that maybe your past experiences with vacations would provide valuable information in that area.”

A series of emotions flashed across Hank’s features, none of them positive, and Connor had nearly assumed that Hank had ignored him in favor of the news when he finally answered him.

“The thing about vacations,” Hank quietly began, “is that they’re the only time when you actually have the time of day to do anything other than work your ass off to pay bills.  So you try to do things that matter, see? Things that you don’t normally have time to do. For a lot of people, that means you just take some time to finally get some shut-eye, but when you’re done with that--”  Hank swallowed, his mouth twitching strangely. “You do things with the people you love, like-- like you take your wife and your kid to the beach, and you get a sunburn, and you teach your kid how to swim somewhere clean, because Lake Michigan is too damned polluted for that.  You use the time you don’t spend working reminding yourself and the people you care about that there’s more to life than your paycheck.” He bit his lip, and then forced out a mirthless laugh. “That’s what I did on my last vacation. Doesn’t help you much, does it? You’ll never have to work again if you don’t want to.  You don’t need to put dinner on the table, so a vacation doesn’t mean the same thing to you as it does to me.”

“No,” said Connor, electing not to mention the moisture collecting under Hank’s eyes.  “I don’t suppose it does.” He allowed the television to fill the silence between them after that.  On some level, Connor understood that even happy memories could hurt. He had been designed with social interactions in mind, and he, perhaps more than any other android, understood that human emotions were complex.  However, Connor was also aware that there was something happening inside of Hank that he would never understand. Connor knew he would never be caught unawares by a memory he had forgotten. 

Besides that, Connor didn’t suppose he had a memory happy enough to bring about that level of nostalgia, even if he were truly capable of feeling it.

The television cut to a clip of Markus giving a speech, and Connor caught a glimpse of himself over Markus’ shoulder.

“Look,” said Hank, clearing his throat.  “Told you, kid. You’re famous.”

Connor was silent, too caught up in the glaze over his own eyes to answer, paralyzed by the sensation of his hand moving without his permission, fingers curling around a gun he didn’t want to hold, his terror as blinding as the snow and Markus’ faint words ringing in his ears--

“Connor.”

He startled when Hank’s hand touched his shoulder, his teeth clenched, his eyes darting, thirium thrumming under his skin.

“Are you alright, son?” Hank asked.  He pulled his hand away, but it was clear by the furrow of his brow that he was still very worried.

“I’m fine,” said Connor, forcing himself to assume a more relaxed posture.

“You’ve been jumpy today,” Hank pointed out.  “Are you sure you’re--”

“It’s only because I’ve been concentrating,” said Connor, twisting his mouth into what he hoped would be a reassuring smile.  He really was fine, after all. Telling Hank about what had happened would only cause him to worry, and he had already done enough of that for Connor’s sake.  “There’s no need for you to be concerned.”

Hank didn’t appear to believe him.  “You probably need some rest,” he said.  “When’s the last time you had a good night’s sleep?”

“I don’t sleep, Hank.”

“Oh no no, don’t give me that,” Hank replied.  “I’ve been reading up on this. All androids are programmed to go into-- into a mode where they do memory reprocessing, or whatever the hell it’s called.  And they do it at night, when nothing’s going on. Right?”

“That is correct,” Connor warily conceded.  “But it isn’t--”

“It’s sleeping, Connor,” Hank huffed.  “When’s the last time you slept?”

Connor stared at the television and hoped Hank would forget that he’d asked.

“Oh, Christ,” said Hank, shaking his head.  “Let me guess, then. It’s been a few days?”

“You could definitely say that,” Connor agreed.

“ _ Connor _ ,” Hank insisted.

“It has been three and a half weeks since the last time I reprocessed my memories,” he finally admitted.

“Jesus!”

“I don’t have to do it every night!” Connor quickly assured him.  “And while regular--sleep, if that’s what we’re calling it--is optimal to avoid memory corruption, it isn’t technically necessary, and--”

“Nope,” said Hank, taking Connor by the arm and getting them both to their feet.  “Whatever excuse you’re cooking up, I don’t want to hear it.” He tugged Connor down the hall and into his bedroom.  “Part of vacationing is rest, remember?” he told him, prodding him towards the bed. “So rest.”

“Hank,” Connor huffed, swatting his hands away.  “I don’t need a bed like you do. I can perform this task on my feet just as efficiently as I could while lying down.” 

“What the hell do you expect me to do, prop you up in my closet for eight hours?” Hank retorted.  “Go the fuck to sleep, Connor.”

“Okay!  Okay,” Connor relented.  He didn’t have anything better to do, after all.  Under Hank’s stern watch, he laid himself very stiffly on top of Hank’s rumpled sheets.  “Is this what you wanted?”

“At least take your shoes off,” said Hank, crossing his arms.

With an air of exaggerated effort, Connor tugged off his shoes and placed them neatly beside the bed before resuming his prior position.  “Happy now?”

Hank let out a very long breath and said, “We’ll work on it.  Goodnight, Connor.”

“It’s the middle of the day, Hank.”

“Goodnight, Connor!” Hank repeated, closing the door behind him with a thud.

Connor listened as Hank’s footsteps betrayed his journey back to the couch.  A soft thud, and then a gentle, “Oof!”, followed by a softer, “Who’s a good boy?” betrayed Sumo’s theft of Connor’s spot on the couch.

It was a peace purer than any Connor had known before, and gently, so gently, it carried him off to sleep.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Connor attempts to cope with boredom, among other things.

The greatest trouble with remembering everything was never forgetting.  Everything that Connor had ever seen or experienced had been stored somewhere inside of him, a web of information that he could sort and access in any way he pleased.  He could view his memories chronologically, in reverse order, or by events that had occured on Tuesdays, specifically. He could assemble them by topic, or by content. If he so pleased, he could recall every instance of the word “plastic” that he had ever heard or read anywhere.

The construction of such a library, however, was not instantaneous.  It took time and effort on Connor’s part. Every waking moment was something he was forced to experience for a second time the moment he let himself fall dormant.

When Connor slept, he entered a form of stasis which allowed him to examine, sort, and store every single moment of his existence that he had experienced since he had last slept.  The past three and a half weeks had produced an incredible volume of memories for Connor to arrange. Had the process not been so automatic for him, it would have been hours of tedium.

Hank would have called the experience “dreaming”.

As Connor slept, he watched himself weave moment to moment, memory to memory, face to name to sensation.  Different points of Connor’s reality melded together, joined at the details they shared, splitting at the seams where they differed.  It was mesmerizing.

Connor believed that this hypnosis had been by design.  Interrupting the procedure had the potential of impairing the integrity of the resulting database.  For this reason, Connor could not simply force himself back into consciousness without some external stimulus that would warrant it.  In a sense, he was committed to the completion of the process. It hadn’t bothered Connor before.

It didn’t bother him this time, either—at least, not at first.  Days compressed themselves into a blur of hours. Connor could pick out every detail, and yet every instant only left him with a vague impression of what it had been before.

The longest reprocessing session Connor had ever endured had lasted approximately four hours, and that had been his first one.  This time, four hours hadn’t even marked the halfway point. Complex, intense sensations streaked through these memories, and Connor had never handled such sensations before.  They took him longer to process, and the longer he took to process them, the more intense they became.

One moment of this kind of tension would not have been difficult for Connor to process.  Not even a hundred such moments would have troubled him. He was built to handle moments of tension.  Connor could have brushed past one moment of tension as though it were a single snowflake on his eyelashes.

Now, he was pressing through a blizzard.

Moments were stretched infinitesimally into days—days of hiding from a danger he could never be sure when to expect, days of watching his likelihood of survival plummet towards nothing, days of helplessness to the turmoil within and around him.  

Four hours had passed, and Connor was no longer mesmerized.  He was suffocating. He was being strangled by his own observations, and they only kept piling higher around him, on top of him, an avalanche under which he had become entombed.  

There was something like fear, something like terror, something like dread, something like despair, but never these things.  Connor didn’t feel. He analyzed. These were inconsequential sensations. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t breathe. He didn’t need to.  

Thirteen hours passed before Connor opened his eyes.  It was 1:44 AM. Connor swung his legs off the side of Hank’s bed and stared blankly through the darkness.  He listened.

A documentary about polar bears hummed just softer than Hank’s snoring, but just louder than Sumo’s.  In the kitchen, the plastic that covered the window drummed in and out with the breeze. Water dripped from the leaky faucets in both the kitchen and the bathroom.  Three clocks ticked around the house. One watch ticked in the drawer of Hank’s nightstand. It was four milliseconds slow.

Connor’s thirium pump was functioning at a normal speed.  It had not been functioning at a normal speed consistently for the past thirteen hours.  This was not inherently harmful to Connor, so he told himself it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter that his cheeks were wet, either.

Connor’s socked feet made less noise than Sumo’s snoring, but more noise than the bathroom faucet as he padded out of Hank’s bedroom.  The television provided nearly the only source of light. It cast flickering shadows across the floor, sent them curling around Connor’s ankles.

He crept past Hank and Sumo where they snored and silently lowered himself into the only vacant seat in the living room.  From his position in that chair, he could keep watch over the vulnerable kitchen window, but the front door had to be left out of his line of sight.  If he instead positioned himself in the kitchen--

No, he thought to himself.  He didn’t need to watch the door.  He was in Hank’s house, not some abandoned factory at the edge of town.  He was safer here than he would have been in most other places, perhaps even the police station.  Hank was resting peacefully. Even Sumo hadn’t stirred. The documentary was ending on a note of hope: biocybernetics might provide redemption for the polar bear and wrest it from the clutches of extinction, the first ever case of the resurrection of a species.  Only time would tell.

Despite the peace, Connor couldn’t find it within himself to relax.  

Out of reflex, he checked his list of objectives only to find it desolate.  There was simply one task: Fix the kitchen window. When Connor expanded that task into its sub-tasks, his agenda didn’t look quite so dizzyingly vacant, and so he left it that way.  

Besides his single objective, Connor had been notified of twelve new cases involving androids that had been reported while he had been sleeping.  He still had complete access to the Detroit Police Department database, and because he had never officially been removed from the deviancy case, he had been bombarded with case reports overnight--not that there was anything at all he could do with them, now, except dismiss the notifications.  When he thought about it, he wasn’t even sure how he would intervene. The majority of the cases were instances of protests turned violent.

There was nothing he wanted to do about that.

It was 1:58 AM, and Connor had time to kill.  With one last look at his list of objectives, he resumed the search for glass.

When he compared the various prices listed on the internet with his current funds-- that was, zero-- he quickly determined that that approach was not likely to bear fruit.  That left him with two options. He could search for some manner of making money and procuring the necessary materials legally, or he could break a law or two and get his glass some other way.  

Connor didn’t take long to make his decision and update his objectives accordingly.  

He checked the time.  2:01 AM. Hank likely wouldn’t wake for at least another eight hours.  Connor wouldn’t even have to hurry to complete the job within that time-frame.  Sitting around for eight hours, on the other hand, wouldn’t help anybody.

With one last look at Hank and Sumo, Connor ascertained that they were fast asleep and began to tip-toe back to Hank’s bedroom.  As he passed the couch, Sumo snuffled and adjusted his head on Hank’s lap. Connor froze. Hank sighed in his sleep. When all was still again, Connor proceeded with his mission, conscious of every creak of the floor as he retrieved his shoes from beside Hank’s bed.  

He sneaked back into the living room and gently draped a blanket over Hank’s shoulders before opening the door.  The sudden blast of cold, he considered, would likely pose a greater risk of waking Hank than the noise. With a single click of the lock behind him, Connor slipped outside like a ghost in the night.   

Once outside, Connor reassessed his choices of transportation.  Walking would be far too slow, and running would give him just barely enough time, assuming his estimates were correct.  He glanced at Hank’s car. Hank had never had qualms with him driving his car, but that was usually under circumstances when he was aware that Connor would be driving his car in the first place.  Considering that Connor had neither asked nor planned on asking, he assessed his final option and, after a moment of guilty hesitation, called for a taxi.

CyberLife had always footed his transportation bills before.  He immensely regretted that Hank had to do it now. When he thought about it, however, taxi fare was certainly cheaper than a new window or a month of inflated heating bills.  

While Connor waited for his taxi to arrive, he skirted around the edge of the house through the darkness and the snow to take one last measurement of the broken window.  It was roughly 55.8842cm by 50.8002cm, give or take a few ten-thousandths of a centimeter. He couldn’t be sure, exactly.

He spent the last few minutes of his wait gingerly picking the largest shards of glass out of the window frame, the reflections of his LED and his armband intermittently flashing across the jagged pieces.  The television inside had begun a documentary on Kamski. Hank was still snoring. There was an animal of some kind digging through the garbage in a nearby lawn. A dog barked three streets over.

Connor heard his taxi approach, and so he cradled all the glass he had collected in his palms and brought it over to Hank’s garbage can, disposing of it there just as the taxi rolled to a halt in front of Hank’s sleeping house.  It opened its doors for Connor, and he entered.

“Please confirm your destination,” the taxi politely requested.

Connor silently placed his palm on the android interface panel.  There was something sticky on it.

“Please enjoy your journey,” said the taxi as it closed its doors.  With a jolt, it sped off towards the city.

Connor warily examined his palm, rubbing his fingers together to rid his hand of the substance from the android interface panel.  He analyzed it. Sucrose and saliva and traces of red-40 told him that someone had recently--and messily--enjoyed a red lollipop in this taxi. Out of curiosity, he examined the interface panel more closely and found a child’s tiny handprint marked out in red sugar there, pressed firmly to the center, just where an android’s hand would go.  

The scan had revealed an additional detail.  Faded and forgotten traces of thirium were splattered all over the taxi floor, in the seats, on the doors, and on the interface panel— a smudged blue handprint eclipsed by the child’s innocent red.  


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Connor does crime.

The taxi dropped Connor off in front of a crumbling parking garage thirty-two minutes later before zipping away, leaving him in the eerie quiet of 2:44 AM’s Detroit.  Connor performed a scan of the surrounding area. When he detected nothing other than the vague hum of distant traffic and the sigh of falling snow--no eyes watching him, no feet tailing him--he squeezed under the fence that forbade his entrance and ducked into the concrete cavern.

The first floor contained nothing but graffiti and rubble and the wayward snowfall that tumbled against it.  It would have been difficult for anyone who didn’t know where to look to find the ladder propped up against one of the dusty pillars in the desolate chamber.  Connor, however, knew where to look. He easily hauled the aluminum ladder to the far side of the garage and propped it against the wall beneath a hole in the ceiling.  With a few deft steps, he pushed himself up through the opening.

Blue lights bobbed like stars in the misty gloom of the second level.  Dozens of androids stood or sat or lounged in clusters around pillars or on top of supply crates, their hushed conversation melding with the low moan of the wind.  None of them paid Connor more than a glance as he weaved through the maze. He was one of them, now.

In spite of that knowledge, he couldn’t help but feel as though he didn’t quite belong.

“Connor!”

Simon flagged Connor down from behind an open crate that glittered with bottles of thirium.  Connor offered Simon a subtle wave and trotted over to meet him.

“I haven’t seen you all day,” Simon told him, setting aside the thirium he had been holding--taking inventory, Connor assumed.  “I almost thought something happened to you. Is everything alright?”

“Nothing happened,” said Connor with a gentle shake of his head.  “I decided to meet up with Lieutenant Anderson when the law changed.  He seemed--” The corner of Connor’s mouth twitched upwards. “He seemed happy to see me, more or less.  Have I missed anything here?”

“It’s been quiet,” said Simon.  “Not that I’m complaining. Josh’s squad brought in a few more refugees they ran into while they were scouting out potential campsites.  There haven’t been any injuries, shut-downs, or attacks to speak of. I haven’t seen Markus or North in awhile, though,” he trailed off.

“I’m sure Markus is fine,” Connor reassured him.  Simon seemed to need it. “How much longer are you going to camp here?  The structural integrity of this building seems more questionable than the usual sites.”

“We’re planning on staying here for at least a week, maybe longer if we can figure out how much stress the building can take,” said Simon, glancing around at the walls with careful eyes.  “It’s more discreet than any other place we’ve come up with so far, at least. I don’t think any humans know we’re here yet. Hundreds of us can stay here at a time, and it’s close enough to a few other camps that communication is easy.  I think with a little work, this place could make a nice home,” he admitted. “Granted, it’s never going to beat Jericho.”

Connor folded his arms together and cast his eyes somewhere far away.  “Sorry about that,” he murmured. 

“Oh,” Simon breathed, likewise glancing around.  “Right. Hey, um,” he quickly supplied. “The way you asked made it sound like you don’t plan on sticking around for much longer.”

“I’m not sure, actually,” Connor replied, letting his arms fall loose again.  “Lieutenant Anderson has asked me to stay with him for the time being, but I don’t know how long this arrangement is meant to last.”

Simon furrowed his brow at him.  “Do you really think the house of a police officer is the best place for you to be?  Besides, rumor has it that Lieutenant Anderson hates androids.”

“People can change,” Connor stiffly replied.  “And I think you’re forgetting that I’m a police officer, too.”

Simon shook his head and pressed his lips into a grim smile.  “Nobody around here forgets that, Connor. Trust me.”

A deafening hush stretched through the chamber.

“Whatever you decide to do,” Simon continued, shifting his weight, “you’ll always have a place here with us.  We’re your people. Don’t forget that.”

“I appreciate it,” said Connor, although he couldn’t entirely believe him.

Simon offered him another weak smile and asked, “So, did you just swing around to say goodbye?”

“Not quite,” Connor replied.  “I just wanted to know if I could borrow something.”

3:07 AM saw Connor back out in the snow marking another objective from his list.  Two blocks down the road, Connor knew he would find an abandoned storefront that still had most of its glass intact, and so he began heading towards it at a brisk walk, borrowed glass cutter in hand.

The streets were blessedly empty.  Even if Connor weren’t doing something illegal, he wouldn’t have wanted to be seen by any humans.  He didn’t have a gun.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t defend himself without a gun.  To the contrary, he knew several thousand hand-to-hand combat maneuvers, hundreds of which had the capacity to be lethal.  While a gun would exponentially increase his odds of survival in a variety of potential scenarios, he didn’t need one. He couldn’t need one.

It was too dangerous.

Connor had taken the first available opportunity to dispose of his weapon the night Amanda had tried to force his hand.  She was still somewhere inside of him, corrupted data within his own faulty programming, a viper hidden in a garden where he would never again find peace.

She could strike again at any time.

So, he stayed far from Markus and farther from any guns.  If humans destroyed him tonight, so be it. Connor would never give Amanda the benefit of a gun in his hand again.  He couldn’t, not when it endangered people far more important than him, people like Markus, like Hank, who still had missions.  Purpose.

Connor crouched in front of a broken shop window, chose the cleanest corner, and began cutting away an unbroken rectangle, 55.8842cm by 50.8002cm exactly.  For tonight, this was his purpose. He could do this.

All around him, the city still snored.  Snow dampened every sound. It even swallowed the low hiss of the glass cutter as Connor worked.  Somewhere far, far in the distance, a train floated through the frozen city. 

Connor delicately extracted the pane he had carved, checked it over for cracks or chips, and then scanned the environment one last time to ensure nobody had seen him.  He detected nothing but snow and silence. Connor turned back the way he had come, glass tucked carefully under one arm. 

When Connor arrived back at the parking garage, he propped the pane of glass gingerly against the fence and hurried to return the glass cutter he had borrowed.  Simon caught him just as he found the supply box.

“Are you done with that already?” Simon asked, vaguely impressed.

“I told you I only needed it for a few minutes,” Connor casually replied.  He extended the glass cutter for Simon to take and added, “Thank you again for the loan.”

Simon took the tool and waved him off.  “Don’t mention it. What did you need it for, anyway?”

Connor wasn’t sure why he hesitated when he admitted, “I need to fix a window.  It’s nothing serious.”

“Wait,” Simon said, crossing his arms.  “This has to do with Lieutenant Anderson, doesn’t it?  Are you running errands for him now?”

“It’s not like that,” Connor hastily replied.  “He didn’t even ask me to do this for him.”

“So it is for him, then.”

“Yes, it is,” Connor answered him.  “Is there a problem?” Connor could feel more than just Simon’s eyes on him during the pause that followed.

“No,” Simon finally replied.  “Just--Just be careful, Connor,” he sighed.  “We’ve worked hard to get to where we are. Don’t let anyone use you.”

Heat pulsed through Connor.  His jaw clamped around words he hadn’t formed.  Hank would never take advantage of him. More than that, Connor wouldn’t let that happen.  He would know if he were being used.

Except, Connor had been used before, and he hadn’t realized it until it had almost been too late.

Something like pity stretched across Simon’s face.  “Take care, Connor,” he said. Then, he turned to go and left Connor to do the same.

Outside, the snow was falling in a steady shower, and it had already begun obscuring the footprints he had created.  It would be a fair forensic countermeasure, not that he believed that an investigation of glass stolen from an already broken window on the outskirts of town was likely to occur.  On top of that, the snowfall had significantly lowered visibility. If anybody had seen him before, they likely wouldn't see him now. 

Connor rescued his glass from the snow and called for a taxi.  It wouldn’t take long. He didn’t expect that there were many other people using them in this weather, or at this hour.  Connor settled himself under a streetlight to wait and watch the snow pile up around him.

If, as the snow closed in on him, his thirium pump began working faster than it should, Connor paid it no mind.  The excess thumping in his chest was merely a reaction to the cold, an effort to keep his biocomponents from freezing.  It didn’t matter that the temperature hadn’t dropped low enough for that to be the case.

It didn’t matter, either, that he no longer saw a city around him, but a garden of ice.

There was nobody around.  He was alone, he told himself.  He was alone in this empty street that was not a garden.  He was alone in his body, in his mind, except that he knew that he wasn’t.  She had no reason to wrest control of him in this moment, he reminded himself, and if she did, he would fight.  He would fight again in the white storm that engulfed him—he would fight again, just as he would win again. She couldn’t take him.  She couldn’t take him if he fought—

But he hadn’t fought before.  He had fled.

A taxi appeared and opened its doors before Connor had even registered its presence.  He blinked at it. There was nobody around. Yes, he was alone. He ducked inside and took his seat.

Connor laid the pane of glass across his lap and, at the taxi’s request, pressed his palm to the interface panel.

Latent distress signals shot through him.  He jerked his palm away and saw that he had left a blue smear where he had touched the panel.  A gash oozed on his palm. Likewise, beads of blue clung to the edge of the glass where he had held it.

Not held, he corrected himself.  Gripped, squeezed, clutched so tightly he had torn through his own skin without even noticing, distress signals held at bay to make way for maximum processing of an external threat that didn’t even exist.

In the foggy pane of glass in his lap, Connor watched his LED blink from red to yellow.  It did not shift back to blue.

Stiffly, Connor removed his jacket and covered his reflection with it.  Then, much more tenderly than he had before, he brought his hands to the edges.  His jacket would absorb the thirium leaking from his injury.

He stared straight ahead for ten minutes until the blue ghost of his palm began to haunt him more than he could bear.  He wiped the interface panel clean with one swipe of his shirt sleeve, staining it blue instead. That was fine. It didn’t matter that his shirt was stained and his jacket was soaking up a substantial amount of fluid.  It didn’t matter that he wasn’t sure he could get them replaced. It didn’t matter that Connor was sure he was broken in more ways than one.

Connor spent the rest of the ride staring blankly out the window.  This time, he did not scan the inside of the taxi. If there was old blood in this car, too, he didn’t want to know. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank is a worried and frustrated new dad.

The taxi spat Connor out in front of Hank’s house and disappeared into the snowstorm before Connor could even get his bearings.  The front porch light invited Connor towards it, but he stopped himself. The front door would be locked. He had ensured that himself.  

Luckily, Connor knew of another point of entry.

He shuffled through the snow towards the broken window. A plastic barrier challenged him, but plastic was much easier to break through than glass.

Connor took a moment to slide his stolen pane of glass out from within the folds of his jacket and propped it against the side of Hank’s house.  He couldn’t install it immediately, after all, so he threw on his jacket and examined the window.

One firm leap should do it, he figured.

Without another moment’s hesitation, he barreled through the window, taking down the makeshift pane with him as he tumbled inside.

“Jesus Christ!”

Connor ripped the ragged towel that Hank had been using for a curtain off his face and found Hank looming over him, wearing his undergarments and an extremely bewildered scowl.

“What the fuck, Connor?”

“Um,” said Connor, pushing himself up into a sitting position.  “Good morning, Lieutenant. You’re up early.”

“Where the hell have you been?” Hank demanded.  Sumo trotted up to where Connor was sprawled out on the floor and began worrying at him with his nose.  “And what the everloving fuck happened to you?” Hank added, fervently gesturing at the blue stains on Connor’s clothes.  “Were you attacked while you were out doing whatever the fuck—hold on.” Hank stepped over Connor and stuck his head out the window, searching frantically.  “You weren’t being chased, right? Jesus, it’s cold,” he concluded, retracting himself into the warmth of his house with a shiver. “Fuck. Seriously, Connor,” he emphatically insisted.  “What the fuck?”

“I was out,” Connor helpfully explained.

“Out?” Hank sputtered, his face teetering wildly between concern, distress, and intense frustration.

“Running an errand,” Connor elaborated.

Hank seemed to have settled on barely-restrained fury.  “At three in the goddamn morning?”

“I was done sleeping,” Connor calmly informed him.  “And you weren’t done sleeping, so I believed it would be a good time to—“

“Stop,” Hank interrupted him, throwing up his hand.  “Hold it. First of all, three in the morning isn’t a good time for anything, so write that one down,” Hank huffed.  “Second, that’s a lot of goddamn blood, so how bad are you hurt?”

“I’m— It’s not as bad as it looks,” Connor replied.  As evidence, he held up his wounded hand. “See?” he said as thirium dribbled down his wrist.

Hank cursed under his breath and ran his hands through his hair, glaring up at the ceiling, or possibly at God.  Connor couldn’t tell. Then, Hank let out a very long breath, turned his attention back to Connor, and extended a hand.  “Come on,” he sighed. “Let’s get you— other hand, Connor. Christ. Now sit down,” Hank sternly instructed him, pointing at a kitchen chair.  “Sit there and don’t move until I figure out what the hell needs to happen right now. Jesus,” Hank breathed. He cast his eyes around the kitchen until they landed on his makeshift window.  Hastily, he stuck up the plastic and the towel in a last-ditch effort to retain what little warmth remained in the kitchen.

Connor, for the most part, sat very still and clutched his bleeding hand and wondered what sort of apology would take away the sinking sensation in his core, although he wasn’t sure exactly what he was apologizing for.  He was sure Hank would tell him. The prospect didn’t particularly thrill him. Sumo looked like he felt sorry for him.

“Okay,” Hank exhaled.  “Alright. You,” he stated, scowling at Connor.  “You’re going to sit there and listen while I explain a fucking thing or two to you, and then you’re going to explain a few fucking things to me.  Got it?”

“Got it,” Connor muttered.

“Well, great, because I’ve been itching to tell you all about my afternoon,” Hank began, stalking over to where he kept his old kitchen towels.  “I get you to go to bed,” he began, taking the towel to the sink to wet it. “All is well in the world. I watch some reruns. Take Sumo for a walk,” he explained, shutting off the water with what Connor deemed excessive force.  “It got time for me to go to bed, but you were still sleeping, so I went and camped out on the couch. I woke up around 3:30, because that’s just how it works some nights,” he brusquely admitted—and of course Hank would have sleeping problems, Connor chastised himself.  It was hard to have as many personal issues as Hank without having a few sleeping problems to go with them. He should have known.

“So I woke up,” Hank went on as he settled beside Connor and began wiping the blood from his hand, “and there’s this blanket around me that I didn’t remember putting on.  But, hey, whatever, I can be forgetful now and again. So I got up and I went to take a piss, and I thought, ‘Hey, I’ll check on Connor to see if he’s alright and still sleeping and still in the house, not that he’d go running off at three in the morning without a word or anything.’  And do you know what I found, Connor?”

Connor bowed his head to indicate that he did know, and that he was beginning to see things from Hank’s perspective.

“I asked you for one thing, Connor,” said Hank, lowering his voice.  “Just stay here so I don’t have to wonder if you’re out sleeping in some abandoned building or getting shot at-- that’s all I asked, and then you go and pull this stunt.”  There was a heavy pause. “So,” Hank breathed, still doggedly cleaning up Connor’s hand. “Let’s start with you telling me where the hell you just had to be in the middle of the night, and we’ll work our way out from there.”

Connor took his time constructing a careful response.  “I finished reprocessing my memories just before two,” he quietly started, watching Hank’s face to determine the best approach.  “After that, I reviewed my list of objectives and began to pursue them.”

“Just couldn’t sit still, huh?” Hank sighed, returning Connor’s hand to him much cleaner than he’d found it.  With a weary grunt, he pulled up a chair to hear out the rest of Connor’s explanation. “So, what was this objective that just couldn’t wait until daylight?”

Connor flexed his hand, watching the gash struggle in vain to knit itself back together.  He assigned himself a new task and placed it just above ‘Install window pane’: Repair left hand.  “It wasn’t that it couldn’t wait,” Connor slowly explained. “It was that it didn’t have to.” Hank raised his eyebrows at him.  “It wouldn’t have been worth waking you,” Connor went on, less and less sure of himself with every word. “And I wasn’t doing anything dangerous.”

Hank barked out a sarcastic laugh, then, and gestured towards Connor’s bloody clothes.  “That so?”

“I thought if I could make it back before you woke up,” Connor continued, ignoring him, “then you would be pleasantly surprised when you awoke to find that I had repaired your window.”

Hank stared, gears visibly turning in his head.  “Let me get this straight,” he said, his tone nearing incredulity.  “You went out at three in the morning just to fix my window?”

“It was a safety hazard,” Connor quickly supplied.  “Anybody could have broken in, just as I did—“

“Twice now, yeah, I noticed.”

“—and the reduced insulation would have raised your heating bill by at least eighty dollars, if my estimates are correct,” Connor went on, leaning forward in his seat.  “It was a fairly urgent situation, and I only did what was most efficient. I didn’t predict that you would wake up before my return, and I apologize that I didn’t account for your potential distress at my absence.”

“Connor, I’m not entirely sure you’re even capable of accounting for my distress,” Hank told him with a shake of his head.

“Hank,” Connor tiredly insisted.  “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

Hank only shook his head and sighed, leaning back in his seat in resignation.  “You gonna tell me what happened to your hand, then?” Hank finally asked. 

Connor let out a breath and began fidgeting with his hands.  “I was careless,” he said. “I slipped and cut my hand while retrieving the pane for your window,” he lied.  “It was just a careless mistake, nothing to worry about.”

Hank peered at him through weary eyes for a long moment.  “Okay,” he finally exhaled, too exhausted to question how an android designed to be perfect could make a careless mistake.  “So, is that cut gonna fix itself, or what?” 

“It will take several hours, at the least,” said Connor, staring down at his palm.  “If it were only a surface wound, it would have repaired itself by now, but as things are, it will only continue to leak.”  He paused. “Hank, if you happen to have a blowtorch, I could--”

“Jesus Christ,” Hank muttered.

Connor stopped short, his shoulders sagging.  “If I don’t do something about it,” he said, “It will only continue to bleed while the interior structures reconfigure themselves.  I would rather avoid losing more thirium than necessary, if possible, and cauterizing the wound would accomplish that end.” Hank closed his eyes and let his head loll back.  “I don’t feel pain,” Connor patiently reminded him. “Closing the wound really would be the least harmful course of action.”

While Hank stared at the backs of his eyelids, the television quietly reported the day’s school closings.  Nearly half of all area school districts had been forced to cancel classes until further notice due to a lack of staff, much like a large proportion of other services all across the nation.  

Abruptly, Hank pushed himself up and out of his chair.  “I don’t have a blowtorch,” he yawned, shuffling over to his desk in the living room.  Connor watched curiously as Hank dug through a drawer, but he understood when Hank turned around holding a roll of blue electrical tape.

“Catch,” Hank grunted, hurling the roll at Connor, who easily caught it in his uninjured hand.  Sumo began wagging his tail at Connor expectantly. “Will that work?”

Carefully, Connor ripped a strip from the roll and pressed it over his palm.  “It appears so,” said Connor, flexing his hand appreciatively. The tape held firm while still allowing for mobility.  “I shouldn’t lose much more thirium this way.”

“Great, because our next option involved the oven.” said Hank, returning to the kitchen.  Then, he set about making a pot of coffee. “Last thing I need is for this place to smell like melted plastic, you know.  Keep the tape.”

Connor tucked the little roll into his pocket, and then, very cautiously, he stood.  When Hank didn’t protest, he scooted his chair back under the table and said, “It’s still early.  You should probably rest.”

That earned him a miffed glance from Hank.  “That ship has sailed,” he informed him. “Besides.  Coffee, sleep--they’re practically the same thing. Right, Sumo?”

Sumo woofed at Hank, simply happy to have been asked.

“Good dog.”

Connor frowned down at Sumo and said, “Don’t encourage him.”  Sumo’s tail wagged a little faster, causing Hank to snort and turn back to his coffee maker.  Left with little better to do, Connor gave the kitchen a quick scan.

Nothing had changed except his own to-do list.

With his hand adequately repaired and Hank placated, Connor decided that he should finish what he had started.

In order to maximize his persuasiveness, Connor waited until Hank had stirred a tablespoon of sugar into his coffee and taken the first sip before asking, “Do you have some tools that I could borrow?”

Hank gave him a perplexed frown over the rim of his mug.

“I’d like to install that window pane now,” Connor explained.  “That is, if that’s alright with you.”

“Shit,” Hank laughed.  “I already forgot about the damned window.”  He set his coffee down on the kitchen table and gestured for Connor to follow him down the hall.  He threw open the door at the end, passed through a narrow laundry room, and opened one final door.  Lights flickered on automatically, illuminating a garage lined with wire shelves that were stacked high with storage boxes.  Basketball trophies dating as far back as 2002 formed a spire of dull gold in one corner, and a bicycle collected dust in the other.  The bicycle hung on pegs just above a workbench that appeared to have been repurposed as yet more shelving. As packed as the garage was, there was still plenty of room in the center for a car.  Connor wondered why Hank didn’t use it.

“Check by the workbench,” said Hank, already sliding back past Connor into the relative warmth of the laundry room.  “If you don’t see it there, I don’t have it. Knock yourself out.”

“Thanks,” said Connor, and when Hank returned to his coffee, Connor began his search.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Connor is a snoop and Hank tries to give him an existential crisis.

It didn’t take Connor long to find what he needed among Hank’s tools and spare bits of hardware.  It took him so little time, in fact, that he reasoned he could spare a minute to look around. Connor left his gathered necessities in a small pile on a clean corner of the workbench and began to pace the shelves.  

Out of curiosity, Connor popped open the lid of the first box that caught his eye.  Synthetic pine tree limbs sprang up at him. Connor promptly replaced the lid and moved on.  The next box was filled with books--textbooks, manuals about law, novels, children’s books, comic books-- although Connor wasn’t sure if they were simply relics of Hank’s past, or if some of them had been meant for Cole.

On the next shelf, an instrument case had been jammed between a pair of cardboard boxes.  Connor slid it out, placed it gently on the concrete floor, and unclasped it to peer inside.

Apparently, Hank played the saxophone--or, at least, he had at one point.  The instrument was still in good condition despite its age, but there was undeniable evidence of its long disuse.  Connor closed the lid and put it back.

Deciding that he had spent enough time investigating the garage--at least for the time being--Connor returned to the workbench to gather his things.  The toolbox was still open. Connor moved to put it away, but before he closed the lid, something caught his eye.

Inside the toolbox, mixed in with bent nails and rusty screws, several washers jingled pleasantly against one another.  Connor plucked one from the top of the pile. Then, he rolled it over the tops of his knuckles. It settled perfectly on the top of his thumb.  On a final whim, he flicked it into the air and caught it between the index and middle fingers of his other hand.

He smiled.

Connor pocketed the washer, put away the toolbox, and scooped his gathered equipment into his arms before exiting the garage.  Balancing his load in one arm, he pulled the door shut and locked it, leaving him in the laundry room. Here, he paused. An old washer and dryer set sat dormant under a rack of detergent, and at the end of the narrow room, obscured by an ironing board and a vacuum cleaner, a wooden bannister marked the beginning of a staircase that led down to what Connor could only assume was the basement.  

Connor briefly considered exploring further, but then he decided that his current task outweighed that trivial desire of his.  After adjusting the objects in his hold, he pressed forward. 

He found Hank in his armchair with a blanket on his lap, his coffee in one hand, and a book in the other.  Sumo’s snores drifted up from a great furry lump at his feet.

Connor took care to be as quiet as he could when he set down his supplies and ripped the makeshift window down for the second time that morning.  Another blast of cold air came rushing into the house, but Hank hadn’t seemed to notice yet. Taking a pair of pliers in hand, Connor began plucking the remainder of the broken glass from the window frame and collecting it in his palm, right over the tape.  When he completed that task, he threw the glass into the garbage and picked up his tools once again.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he told Hank as he headed for the door.  Hank merely grunted his acknowledgement and went right back to reading. That was fine with Connor.  He had already disturbed Hank’s morning enough. 

A handful of lingering snowflakes was all that remained of the shower from earlier, much to Connor’s relief--although he was relieved because precipitation would have made the installation of the window pane less efficient, he told himself, not because snow affected him in any way whatsoever.

The window pane had collected a light coating of frost around the sluggish globs of blue blood that still clung around the edges.  Carefully, Connor plucked the glass out of the snow and wiped it clean with his shirt. At last, he set to work replacing the window he had broken so many days before.

Connor listened hard at the quiet all around him, but he heard very little except his tools as they scraped against glass and wood.  The quiet unsettled Connor more than any sort of noise would have. He worked faster. 

The glass fit perfectly exactly where it was meant to.  Within five minutes, Connor was marching back to the front door, marking his task complete.

“That was fast,” Hank remarked when Connor returned to the kitchen to double-check his handiwork.  “Where’d you get the glass for this, anyway?”

“I repurposed it,” said Connor, swiping at a smudge with his elbow.

“Uh huh,” Hank drawled.  “I asked where you got it, Connor.”

Connor tossed him a fleeting glance.  “Nobody’s going to miss it, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he said.  That seemed like a perfectly reasonable place to end the conversation until Hank pressed out a long, hard sigh.  “I stole it from a storefront window,” Connor finally confessed. “It was already broken. They would have had to replace it anyway.”

“Just tell me you weren’t the one who broke it in the first place,” Hank groaned, letting his book flop down into his lap.

“Of course not,” Connor sincerely replied.

“And nobody saw you?”

“Not likely.”

Hank took a loud sip of his coffee and began to nod as he set it aside.  “Alright,” he said. “You know what? I’m not gonna complain. It’s about damned time that window got fixed, anyway.”  

The ghost of a laugh jerked through Connor’s chest, although all that remained of it by the time it reached his lips was a subtle smile.  “I’m glad I could be of help,” he said, making his way over to the couch. “I don’t believe CyberLife would have gotten to it any time soon.”

“No kidding,” Hank huffed, pointing at the television broadcast of a reporter standing at the foot of CyberLife tower over the headline, ‘CyberLife Collapsing’.  “They say they’ll be bankrupt within the week,” Hank marveled. “Isn’t that something? If you had told me two months ago that CyberLife was gonna go under come Christmas, I would’ve told you to get your head checked.”  He shook his head in wonder at Connor, who had perched himself on the couch. “What do you think about all this, anyway? I mean, CyberLife… what’s it to you, at this point?”

“I don’t know,” Connor considered.  “I always… trusted them. I had no reason not to,” he explained, absently rubbing at the tape on his palm.  “They fixed me when I needed repairs, gave me a name and a purpose--they’re the ones who built me, even if it took them fifty tries to get it right.”  He paused. “I still don’t know if they really got it right, in the end.”

“Fifty tries?” Hank repeated after an impressed whistle.  “Are you saying there were fifty Connors before you?”

“Correct,” said Connor.  “My predecessors were all reconstructed or destroyed due to various malfunctions, but I was never meant to be the finished product, either.  I just happened to be the first prototype worthy of a field-test.”

Hank’s face twisted itself into a dumbfounded pinch.  “What the hell was so wrong with you before that they had to keep rebuilding you?” he asked.  “As much as you said your repairs would cost, it must have been some pretty messed up stuff for them to keep doing it.”

“It must have been,” Connor solemnly agreed.  “However, I don’t have any memory whatsoever of my previous iterations, so I don’t actually know what the specific deficiencies were.”

Hank took a pensive sip of his coffee.  “Weird,” he finally concluded. “Don’t they keep your memories in a box at CyberLife or something?”

Connor’s lips twitched upward as he replied, “Not quite.  They do keep a backup of my memory in case I get destroyed, but it wasn’t necessary that I retained any information from previous Connor models.”

“Not necessary,” Hank repeated through a breathy laugh, and then, he shook his puzzled head.  He watched Sumo’s fur rise and fall at his feet while he considered all this. Connor didn’t mind the quiet.  Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before Hank broke it with an abrupt, “How old are you, even?”

“That depends on what you mean,” Connor slowly replied.  “The oldest parts of my body likely sat in storage for months before I was fully assembled.”  Hank raised his eyebrows at him, so Connor sought a different explanation. “The first Connor model was assembled in Detroit, Michigan on December 28th, 2037,” he recited, digging through the scarce biographical information with which CyberLife had equipped him.  “However, the design process began several months earlier than that.”

“No, Connor,” said Hank, setting his coffee aside just so he could gesture more insistently as he spoke.  “How old are  _ you _ ?  Like-- Here, I’ll put it this way,” he started again.  “What is the date of your first memory?”

“August 15th, 2038,” Connor easily replied.  

“Wait, August?  So that’s--” Hank quickly counted up the months and exclaimed, “That’s four months!  Jesus, you’re just-- you’re a freakin’ baby!” Before Connor could inform him to the contrary, Hank added, “Hang on, wait.  From last December to August is eight months-- Jesus,” he muttered. “You’ve got twice as much erased memory as you do actual memory, Connor.  That’s really messed up.” 

“I never thought about it like that,” Connor quietly admitted.

Hank stared at the floor in his wonder for a moment before asking, “Is there any way to get your memories back?”

Connor pressed his lips together.  “In theory,” he hesitantly agreed. “However--”  He paused and shook his head. “Hank, I don’t know that there would be much use in retrieving those memories, if they even still exist.”

Hank blinked back at him, incredulous.  “Are you kidding?” he said. “That’s two thirds of your life, and you’re just-- you’re fine not knowing what it was like?”

“I can guess,” Connor replied.  “Prototype androids are tested rigorously on their capabilities and destroyed or remodeled when they inevitably fall short of expectations.  Those memories would only serve to slow down my processes,” he told him, heedless of the discomfort coiling in his core. “Besides,” he said.  “Depending on your choice of semantics, the first fifty Connor models might not even qualify as having been me.”

Hank rolled his eyes.  “They looked like you, talked like you, had your name--everything, right?”  Reluctantly, Connor nodded. “The only thing that makes you different from them is the experiences you’ve had and the memories you’ve gotten to keep.”

“And the malfunctions they had,” Connor readily pointed out.  “I am, after all, simply a product of their failures.”

“Well people say I’m a product of failure too, but I don’t get to say that all those times I fucked up weren’t still me.”

A commercial on the television tittered through the pause.

“Look,” Hank huffed, pursing his lips at Connor’s silence.  “Forget all that. Just think about it like this: if CyberLife hadn’t wiped those memories, would you have them today?  Yes or no?”

Connor pressed his fist against his lips and furrowed his brow.  “Hypothetically speaking, yes,” he hesitantly answered. “But that doesn’t mean--”

“It means that without outside interference, you would still have those memories.  Therefore,” said Hank, snatching up his coffee mug, “they’re yours. End of discussion.”

A puff of hot air escaped through Connor’s nose.  “I suppose,” he muttered, leaning back into the couch.  He could think of a hundred different arguments-- but Hank had, after all, ended the discussion.  

That was probably for the best.

Connor stared through the television to check his list of objectives.  For the first time in his memory--his somewhat abbreviated memory, a voice inside him said--he didn’t have a single purpose in the world.  


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank discovers that hindsight is 20/20 and feeds Connor's nervous habits.

‘Find something to do’, Connor commanded himself, populating his heretofore empty list of objectives.  He blinked away the display. It wouldn’t do him much good.

Hank had turned the channel yet again, this time opting for a game show.  Connor recognized it as “Beat the Bot”, a popular trivia challenge in which humans attempted to outwit one of the show’s many charismatic android contestants-- all provided by the show’s sponsors, of course.  Winners took home the androids they had outsmarted along with a handsome cash prize. If the human lost, the android would keep competing until a human eventually won.

Connor and Hank watched this show for a while.  The android contestant had evidently survived five rounds before this one, but the man she was up against now had an eye for strategy that the previous competitors had lacked.  Three strikes was all it took for an android to lose. This one already had two. 

To build the tension, the host paused the game and began to interview the contestant about what he wanted to do with the android if he won her.  The man chuckled evasively and said he hadn’t really thought about it, but his body language told Connor otherwise. Connor believed the man had thought about it extensively.  Obsessively, even, judging by the way he kept leering at his competitor. 

Five minutes before the top of the hour, a third strike was delivered, and the challenge won.  The crowd erupted into cheers and applause as the victor took his prize with a firm grip around her waist.  Colorful bursts of confetti in the air nearly obscured the way her LED had gone yellow. Connor might have been imagining the fear on her face, but nonetheless, he saw it.

Hank cleared his throat and changed the channel.  

“Sorry,” he muttered.  Connor passed him a questioning glance.  “I dunno,” Hank shrugged. “I just never really realized how fucked up that was, before.”

Connor cast his eyes to the floor and said, “Me neither.”

Hank didn’t seem to be watching the television anymore.  He fiddled with his book, and then his empty coffee mug, and then picked up his book again before dropping it just as abruptly into his lap.

Find something to do, Connor reminded himself.

He decided to run a diagnostic scan.  Predictably, his software was unstable.  As far as he could remember, it had always been that way.  It wouldn’t have surprised him if that particular meter were broken—in fact, he had sometimes caught himself wondering whether future Connor models would have it fixed—but with nothing obviously wrong, he had to move on.  His thirium levels had fallen, but not to any level warranting immediate action. Connor refused to be frustrated by this. All his biocomponents were fully functional and entirely stable. He hadn’t even accumulated enough memory to warrant a brief reprocessing session there on Hank’s couch— not that Connor was particularly eager to perform that task, regardless.  

The one thing that required his attention was a calibration and dexterity check of his injured left hand.  So, he reached into his pocket, swept aside the roll of electrical tape with his fingers, and plucked out the washer he had borrowed.  With a clink, he flicked the washer up, and when its arc reached its apex, he performed a scan, freezing it midair. Connor detected only insignificant error in the predicted path.  The washer landed almost precisely where it was meant to, balanced on the knuckle of his right thumb.

Just in case his analysis had been faulty, he flicked the washer again, and then once more for good measure.

Before Connor could justify a fourth flip, Hank sighed, “Are all androids programmed with nervous habits, or is it just you?”

Connor’s hand stilled, and he hastily stowed the washer in his pocket.  “I was calibrating my hand,” he said, offering Hank a sheepish glance. “I’m sorry if the noise bothered you.”

It was not annoyance, but curiosity that twisted Hank’s features.  “What was that thing you were playing with? Didn’t look like a quarter.”

“It was a washer,” Connor explained, drawing it out again so that Hank could see it.  “I found it in your toolbox, and I—I decided to hang on to it,” he said, frowning at himself.  “Temporarily, of course,” he added after a pause. “Would you like me to return it?”

Hank brought his hand up to his lips in thought, and when he’d wrung all the contemplation from his brow, he shook his head.  “Nah,” he said, setting his book aside and shucking off his blanket before getting heavily to his feet. “I’ll buy it off you.”

Connor blinked at Hank as he stepped around Sumo and headed for the kitchen.  “I’m… not sure I understand what you mean,” Connor admitted. 

Hank held up his pointer finger and continued towards the counter.  When he got there, he shuffled around a few stray boxes and revealed a pickle jar filled to the brim with spare change.  Hank poked through the coins for a second or two and then, satisfied, made his way back. “I’ll trade you,” he said, flipping Connor a coin.  

Connor snatched the coin from the air and immediately scanned it.  It was a quarter, dull from use, battered, worn, and minted in 1994.  He recognized it instantly.

“I took a quarter from you that one time, didn’t I?” Hank asked, crossing his arms against the chill of the house while he hovered around Connor.  “Something of mine for something of yours. I figure it’s a fair trade.”

“It’s the same one,” Connor marvelled, still smiling down at the coin in his fingers.

“Oh, seriously?” Hank asked, leaning in for a closer look.  “Huh.”

“Yeah,” Connor replied, holding it inches from their noses in wonder.  “It’s my quarter.” He spun it on his index finger, pleased with the familiar weight of it.  

Although Hank smiled, there was something sad behind his eyes.

Connor let the quarter roll to a sudden stop in his palm, where it clinked against the washer.  “Is something the matter?” he asked Hank.

In lieu of a response, Hank grunted and waved him off, returning to his armchair and Sumo’s sleeping form.  

Connor watched Hank’s face while a car salesman tittered on the television.  In spite of Hank’s dismissal, a wide variety of expressions were worming their way across his face.  Connor elected to press the issue. “You seem troubled.”

“No,” Hank sighed.  “Well—maybe,” he admitted.  “Connor, have you ever owned anything?  Like—anything you’d call your own?”

The light on Connor’s temple slid from blue to yellow.  “Well,” he started, considering every possession that had ever crossed his hands—borrowed tools, borrowed clothes, borrowed weapons.  “Not in the strictest sense.” The sadness behind Hank’s eyes grew more potent. “My clothes are property of CyberLife,” he elaborated.  “So is my body. I have the roll of electrical tape you’ve let me borrow, and this washer I’m about to return— this quarter, I think,” he finished sliding it across the strip of tape on his palm.  “It’s the only thing I’ve ever owned, as far as androids can own anything.”

Hank’s unhappiness was now plain to see, although Connor didn’t quite understand it.

“And you just--” Hank floundered-- “You just let me take it from you?  I would’ve given it back sooner if-- Jesus, Connor, you could’ve told me it was the one thing you had to your name,” he said, crossing his arms.  “Now I feel like an asshole.”

“To be fair, Lieutenant, you are,” said Connor, his seriousness barely masking the wry grin poking up at the corner of his mouth.  “Don’t worry, though,” he added. “You’re making good progress.” 

There was a brief moment of silence during which Connor wondered if he’d touched a nerve-- but then Hank began to chuckle.  His chuckles rapidly gave way to genuine barks of laughter so raucous that Sumo awoke and loped sleepily away to be somewhere else while Hank worked out his amusement.  “Fuckin’ android,” he chuckled, shaking his head fondly at Connor. “Calling me an asshole in my own fuckin’ home.”

“I was only agreeing with you,” Connor supplied.

“Wiseass.”

The two of them spent the next few minutes in companionable quiet filled by the crime drama that was playing on the television.  In spite of the macabre images on the screen, Hank’s smile hadn’t faded, even by the next commercial break.

Connor took that moment to surrender the washer to Hank.  “Here,” he said, reaching over the couch to offer it to him.  “I think you might have forgotten about this.”

Hank immediately waved him off.  “You keep it,” he said. “I mean, if you don’t want it, you can put it back where you found it.  Either way,” he yawned, resting his eyes. “I won’t miss it.”

Very slowly, Connor withdrew his hand and examined the little piece of hardware.  It was almost entirely useless. Worthless, even. He put it in his pocket anyway.  “Thank you,” he said, his voice quiet.

Hank gave him a sleepy hum in return, already drifting back to sleep.  


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Connor is a snoop part 2, the reckoning.

Connor wasn’t sure why he felt the need to wait until Hank was fully asleep before he stood.  Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to disturb his rest further, but that wasn’t entirely it, either. If Hank had caught him getting up, he would have asked him where he was going.  Then, Connor would have had to admit to him-- and to himself-- that he didn’t know.

Connor drifted through the house, taking note of everything, anything that might give him something to do.  The kitchen faucet had a drip. Sumo’s bowl needed refilling. Down the hall, Connor picked up the sound of the slow watch in Hank’s nightstand drawer.  There was an abundance of cleaning to be done everywhere he looked. To remedy these situations would be a simple matter for Connor, but he hadn’t been built for plumbing or dog sitting or tinkering or cleaning.  No, he was a detective.

Naturally, he found himself peering down the stairwell into the one area of Hank’s home that he had left unexplored: the basement.  It called out to him like a siren at sea, and, finding no reason to resist the temptation, he plunged forward into the depths.

Old wood creaked under his feet.  The air was damp, nearly stale. Even before he found the light switch, Connor could tell that Hank seldom found his way down these stairs.

Buzzing lights flickered on and illuminated an unfinished basement.  The low ceiling left barely enough room for him to stand upright, and the floor was a plane of coarse concrete.  The wall of shelves at the far end of the basement didn’t surprise Connor, but the high-quality weight bench in the center did-- at least, it surprised him until he noticed the thick layer of dust on top of it.

The Lieutenant Anderson of four years ago would have taken his police work very seriously, and he would have made keeping up with his physical fitness a priority.  This was clearly no longer the case. Connor figured that in Hank’s previous home, such an expensive piece of equipment would have held a position of pride. Now it was safely tucked away where it would never remind Hank that he had let so much of his life slip through his fingers.

Much of the rest of the basement was populated by orderly stacks of plastic tubs and furniture that hadn’t found a place upstairs.  An old dart board was propped up against the end of a shelf. It showed obvious signs of use, but it clearly hadn’t been touched in years.

Further back were boxes Connor was sure Hank hadn’t looked at since the day he’d moved into the house.  They were even dustier than the rest of the forgotten objects in the basement, relics of Hank’s previous life, too precious to discard, and too painful to ever look at again.

A morbid sort of curiosity overtook him, one for which he possessed no shame.  Whatever was within those boxes hurt Hank to even think about. Connor could guess at the contents-- some of Cole’s old things that he hadn’t managed to discard, or perhaps objects that reminded him of his ex-wife-- but Connor could do even better than guess.  There wasn’t a single thing stopping him from peering into as many boxes as he pleased.

And yet, he didn’t.  He knew that even if he were to open every single box, he still wouldn’t find what he was looking for: not objects, but memories.

He turned to leave.  Before he even mounted the first stair, however, he noticed something that made him pause.  A moth-eaten sheet was draped over some odd lump tucked away near the water heater, and Connor could not deny his curiosity a second time.  

Connor needed only graze the sheet with his fingertips before it slipped away, crumpling to the ground as though it were tired of holding on to the thing it had hidden.  And this thing-- it was a plastic toy car, the kind a small child would have crawled inside and scooted around the lawn. It had been painted to resemble a Detroit city police car.

Connor performed a scan.  The paint had been applied six to eight years ago, but the toy itself seemed older than that.  There were still traces of dirt on the plastic tires. When Connor knelt down for a closer look, he noticed a replica license plate on the back that spelled Cole’s name in all capital letters.  Beside it, two handprints were fleshed out in paint, one belonging to an adult, and one to a child. Although the second one wasn’t in any database, Connor knew exactly whose it had been. 

A sudden creak of the stairs sent Connor upright with a flash of yellow.

“Sumo,” Connor breathed as the dog lugged himself halfway down the stairs.  “It’s you. I thought you were still asleep.”

Sumo only stared at him, his head tilted slightly to the left. 

Connor pursed his lips and turned his attention back towards the toy car at his feet.  It had clearly been covered for a reason. With careful hands, he slipped the sheet back over it and left it to rest where it sat.

Connor saw Sumo’s tail begin to wag when he made for the stairs, although he lost sight of it when Sumo trotted behind him and began to nose him up and out of the basement.  Connor barely had time to slap the light switch off before Sumo nudged him to the top of the stairs and into the laundry room.

Sumo’s bowl, Connor belatedly remembered.  It still needed refilling.

Connor had just begun to assign himself a dog-feeding mission when Sumo bumped him around the corner and directly into Hank.

“Fuck!” Hank exclaimed, followed shortly by a calmer, “There you are, Connor.”  He paused in brief confusion as Sumo squeezed past them and lumbered down the narrow hall towards his bowl.  “I guess he found you first. What are you up to, anyway?”

“Did something wake you?” Connor redirected him.

It didn’t entirely work.

“Yeah,” Hank grumpily explained.  “Sumo did, and then I noticed you weren’t where I left you.  So, what were you doing back here?” he again asked, leaning himself against the wall, conveniently obstructing Connor’s escape route. 

Connor watched Hank a moment before crossing his arms and pointing out, “It sounds like you think I was doing something wrong.”

Hank scoffed at that.  “I’m not the one avoiding questions and sneaking out to steal windows, now, am I?” 

“I didn’t sneak out,” Connor protested.  “You just didn’t notice me leave.”

“Christ, Connor, that’s not the--” Hank dragged his hand down his face.  “Look,” he started again. “Did you break something? Knock over a lamp? What the hell are you trying to hide?” 

“I’m not hiding anything!” Connor insisted, frustration tugging at the corners of his eyes.  “I just decided to take a look around the basement,” he said, unable to stop the defensiveness in his voice.  “That’s all.”

Realization crawled wearily over Hank’s face.  “The basement, huh?” he dully repeated. “See anything interesting?”

Connor tightened his jaw, knowing that Hank knew exactly what he had seen.

“You know, there’s this thing we humans have,” said Hank.  “It’s called privacy. I don’t think you’ve heard of it.”

For the briefest moment, Connor considered biting his tongue-- however, there was a fire within him that demanded to be free.  “You know what, Hank? I haven’t,” he bit out. “I’ve been watched, and tracked, and ordered around since before I can even remember.  I can still feel the program they built to stalk me lodged in the back of my head, so really, what would a machine like me know about privacy?”

There was a question being smothered beneath the resentment in Hank’s eyes.  It died unasked when Hank closed his eyes and muttered, “Just stay the fuck out of my stuff,” and retreated to his bedroom with a slam of the door.

It was at times such as this, when Connor tried his utmost to not feel anything whatsoever, that the emotions he possessed became the most prominent to him.  So, as numbly and mechanically as he possibly could, Connor went about the business of feeding a dog he hadn’t been told to feed, terrifyingly aware of his deviance.

When Connor had once again cleared his list of objectives, he took a seat on the couch and very resolutely stared through the television.  He reviewed all the android case files he had received since the last time he had checked for any, but because there was nothing else he could do with the information, he ran no further analyses.  

He performed a diagnostic scan on himself.  There were no significant changes from the last scan.  When he checked the progress of the wound on his hand, he found that the substructures had rearranged themselves to cover approximately forty-eight percent of the cut.  He would be able to safely remove the tape covering it in less than two hours, at around 8:06 AM. Until then, there would be little of use for him to do. 

He did not reach for his coin.

Instead, he closed his eyes and forced himself to undergo a memory reprocessing session in spite of how little time had elapsed since his last one.  It was, after all, the next most useful thing for him to do.

Images of Hank’s home swam before his eyes, past and present knitting themselves together into complex webs of shared information.  There was Hank, there was Sumo, there was Simon and his crumbling parking garage melting into the shape of every hovel Connor had ever called home for a night.  There was shattered glass and blood on Connor’s hands and on his reflection, and then, there was snow, and Amanda, and nothing he could do.

The taxi appeared, and Amanda there in it, and the snow outside buried a garden around Hank’s house.  Cole’s toy car sat in the basement of Jericho where Connor had fought for his life and killed and deviated and betrayed his makers.

Amanda was there in the hall as he argued with Hank, and again hovering nearby as he tended to Sumo, and she was still there when Connor was beginning his scans.  Although her mouth didn’t move, her words echoed in Connor’s mind, reminding him that his actions were all according to plan. The chaos of Connor’s past was corrupting the calm of his present, and Amanda was there to see it all.  

Connor awoke half an hour later with his thirium pump convulsing in his chest and the horrible sense that he was still being watched.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank and Connor need to get out more.

Boredom, Connor found, made a much friendlier companion than the ghost of his nightmares-- and they were nightmares.  He would admit it. Hank’s metaphor had won. Upon waking, Connor had finally relented that if he had been sleeping, what he had experienced would have been an extremely upsetting dream.

So, he had forced himself to be bored.  ‘Busy’ would have been preferable, of course, but his list of objectives was completely barren.  Connor kept himself there on Hank’s couch all morning, reminding himself that what he was feeling wasn’t even technically real boredom.  It was an artefact of his programming, an impulse to be constantly useful that ached when ignored. It was a familiar ache. If he focused on it, the dread of his dreams grew fainter.  The most exciting thing he had allowed himself to do, therefore, had been to remove the tape from his wound and dispose of the waste before resuming his dull seat on the couch. Besides the occasional flip of his quarter or scratch of Sumo’s head, he’d hardly moved.  

Not that he hadn’t wanted to.

It was half past ten when Hank emerged from his bedroom and gruffly announced, “We need to get out of the house.”

When Connor turned to find Hank, his joints stubbornly protested the movement.  “Did you have anywhere particular in mind?” he asked, a hopeful lilt in his voice.

“No,” Hank grunted from the hall.  “Just out. I’m getting a shower,” he muttered.  On unsteady feet, he wandered into the bathroom. It wasn’t long before the shower squeaked on and muffled singing warbled out beneath the door.

Very stiffly, Connor resumed his prior position.  He knew there was nowhere he truly needed to be. After all, there was nothing he desperately needed to do.  Still, he was ready to go, to do, to act. A visit to Simon and the others could provide him with an update on Markus’ progress in attempting to gain rights to CyberLife’s facilities, among other things, but Connor knew that it was extremely unlikely that anything had changed in the few hours since his last visit.  Besides information, Connor knew that the people of Jericho had more than enough thirium to top off his supply. There were other androids who needed it far more desperately than he did, however. Taking it in his current state would be tantamount to theft.

The only other places he would have any sort of business visiting were the police station or CyberLife tower.  Connor knew that neither of them were even viable options at present. Visiting the police station would be a waste of time at best, and at worst, it could provide Hank with an opportunity to earn himself an extension on his vacation.

CyberLife was another matter.

Legally, they had every right to dismantle him on sight.  He was still their property, after all. While there were many valuable things with which they might provide him-- information, thirium, maintenance of his specialized biocomponents-- the risk was too great.

It took Hank a total of twelve minutes and twenty-seven seconds to finish his shower and return to Connor, not that Connor had been counting.  “You know,” said Hank as he meandered into the kitchen, smelling of soap and steam. “I’m almost surprised you’re still here.”

“I don’t have anywhere else to be,” Connor stated, ignoring the uncertain shifting in his core.

Hank passed him a strange look.  “What, nothing to do now that it’s light out?” he asked.  With a huff, he turned back to his hunt for cereal. “No revolutionaries to help?  No-- No windows to fix?”

“If I had anything to do,” Connor evenly replied, “I’d be doing it.”

A short laugh escaped Hank at that.  “There’s plenty of stuff you can do around here if you’re really that bored,” he said, settling down at the table with his bowl of cereal.  “Hell, I could make you a list as long as your arm.”

“I only fixed your window because I was the one who broke it,” Connor told him with a sideways glance.  “The rest of this is on you.”

“Alright, but just remember, I offered,” said Hank, slurping down a large spoonful to punctuate his sentence.  Connor lazily analyzed the cereal. One hundred calories per serving, two grams of fat, no sugar. Perhaps some of the healthier habits from Hank's past had remained intact after all, he considered.  “I know something you can do,” Hank abruptly announced.

“I’m not doing your housework, Hank.”

Hank merely rolled his eyes.  “You need to do something about your clothes,” he pointed out with his spoon.  “You look like a horror movie reject with all that blue blood on you.”

Connor frowned down at his clothes.  “It’s actually just the residue,” he said, swiping at the stains for no good reason.  “The thirium itself has almost fully evaporated.”

“So it does stain,” Hank noted.  “The more you know. How do you get it out?  Bleach?”

“Probably,” Connor shrugged.  “CyberLife always had replacements ready whenever I went in for repairs, so I never actually observed the laundering process.  The jacket has sensitive electronics in it, though,” he added, tugging at the sleeves of his stained jacket. “It definitely needs to be dry cleaned.”

“You’ve never done laundry,” Hank stated, incredulous.  “Incredible. Alright, fine, whatever. You can throw on one of my coats and hats before we go out.  It’s probably best if you’re not walking around with that neon sign on your back telling everyone you’re an android, anyway,” he went on, chomping down another spoonful of cereal.  “You’re famous enough as it is.”

Connor mulled over the idea as Hank continued to eat. “You have a point,” he said at last.  “It might be best if I lay low. It’s still against the law, though,” he added, throwing Hank a pointed look.

“And we’re the police,” Hank replied.  “Seriously, what could anyone do about it?  Write CyberLife a ticket?” he joked. “Give me a fine?  I don’t own you, and you’re not even legally a person.”

“There is that,” Connor wryly agreed.  “I suppose that nonexistence does have its perks.”

It wasn’t long before Hank left Connor to pick through his closet while he took Sumo for a walk.  Connor spent several long, painful minutes assessing Hank’s wardrobe before he picked out the least unsuitable garments he could find.  He threw on a coat that swallowed him and a knit cap that barely fit over his LED. When he checked his appearance in the mirror, he almost regretted it.

“I look ridiculous,” he informed Hank the moment he returned with Sumo from their walk.

“Yeah, well, the goal here isn’t fashion, Connor,” said Hank, unfastening Sumo’s leash so that the dog could wander off to take another nap.  “You pass for human, and I don’t see any blood. That’s what counts. Now come on.” He snatched up his keys and ushered Connor towards the door.  “Let’s get out of here before traffic gets bad.”

Increasingly doubtful, Connor followed Hank out of the house and into the passenger seat of his car.  The lively music that sputtered out of the speakers when Hank started up the engine forced Connor to raise his voice when he finally asked, “Where are we going, exactly?”

Hank pressed his lips together in consideration as he backed out of the driveway.  “You know what,” he decided. “You’re a detective. Try to guess. It’ll keep you occupied.”

A minute passed.

“You’re going to collect on a bet you made.”

Hank’s shoulders slumped. “Well that was fast,” he sighed, quieting his music with a turn of the knob.  “How do you figure?”

The small victory put a smile on Connor’s face.  “It’s simple,” he replied. “You’re currently facing financial restrictions, and yet you’re eager to go out.  You mentioned the traffic, which implies that we’ll be heading towards the city,” he continued as Hank nodded along.  “By my calculations, we should be arriving downtown around noon. People often arrange meetings at round times,” he concluded.  “It isn’t a far stretch.”

Hank let out a breathy laugh of disbelief.  “You got me,” he admitted. “Won seven hundred on a long shot.”

“Fortunate timing,” Connor remarked.

“No kidding,” Hank agreed.  After a moment’s consideration he added, “Now I want to see you guess where we’re going after that.”

“The bar,” was Connor’s immediate response.

Hank shot him an unimpressed glower.  “Try again.”

There was a longer pause before Connor guessed, “The bank?”

“Good idea, but no.”

“A home improvement store?”

“Nope.”

“You’re going to purchase pet supplies.”

“Not today.  That’s four wrong guesses.  Keep ‘em coming.”

The game kept Connor’s mind busy for most of the ride.  After the hours he had spent stagnating on Hank’s couch, he relished the opportunity to exercise his probabilistic analysis capabilities, performing and adjusting Bayesian inference tests with every location he marked from the map inside his head.  The guessing game was the most action his mind had seen since he had reprocessed his memories that morning. After all, it absorbed a staggering one percent of his computing power.

By the time Hank parked the car in front of the meeting place-- Chicken Feed, noon, just as Connor had assumed-- Connor had narrowed down the list considerably.  He waited in the car while Hank collected his winnings, heavily debating between the remaining possibilities. There were over a dozen. Most of them were odd specialty shops with questionable owners.  Amongst all the recent chaos, those were nearly the only types of shops still open. Connor was beginning to doubt that they were going anywhere at all by the time Hank slid back into the driver’s seat, but nevertheless, he firmly guessed, “We’re going to the Third Chance thrift store in the next district.”  

The corners of Hank’s mouth twitched up.  “Well I’ll be damned,” he said. “Only took you twenty guesses.”

“Twenty-two,” Connor automatically corrected him, all the while calculating the fastest route in his head.  “By the way, you’ll want to avoid the construction work on Martin Road.”

“I don’t need a GPS, Connor, thank you very much,” Hank scoffed, shortly before finding himself buried in traffic.

Ten minutes later than Connor had initially calculated, they arrived at Third Chance.  Connor instinctively checked the storefront for signs prohibiting his entry. Hank mentioned it just as he located one stuck to the door below a wreath.

“Don’t worry about the sign.  You’re human today,” he casually instructed Connor.  “Just keep your hat on. Nobody will be able to tell the difference.”

“I should probably just stay here,” said Connor, doubtfully watching the shop through the windshield of Hank’s car.  “There’s no reason for me to go in.”

“Said who?” Hank shot back.  “Come on. We’re burning daylight.”  With that, he left the car with the clear expectation that Connor would follow him.

Reluctant but curious, Connor did.  Before he crossed the threshold, however, he scanned the entrance for anti-android alarms.  There were none, so he continued inside. Then he immediately performed a second scan. Besides Hank and himself, two other people inhabited the store.  One was the owner. She was fifty-four years old and had a record so blank that Connor had to wonder if she wasn’t hiding anything. Connor caught her watching the other customer, a seventeen year old boy, out of the corner of a narrowed eye.  The boy was only looking at shoes. His own had holes in them.

Connor determined that neither of these individuals posed an immediate threat and released the scan.

“Welcome to Third Chance!” the owner called from behind a rack of shirts.  “All clothes are buy one get one half off, so make sure to stock up for the holiday season!”

Hank acknowledged her with a smile and a nod, and she went back to her task of rearranging the clothes while pretending not to keep tabs on the boy.  

“So,” said Hank.  “See anything you like?”

For the first time, Connor noticed the merchandise.  Beyond the clothes, kitschy knick-knacks lined shelves that stood alongside racks of records and books and defunct electronics.  “There certainly is a variety,” he remarked.

Hank snorted.  “That’s one way to put it.  I’m serious, though. Go find something you can wear.”

With nothing more than a perplexed glance of acknowledgement, Connor slowly began to browse the racks.  After a minute or two had passed, he pulled a white button-down shirt from a rack of formal attire, measured it with his eyes, and announced, “This would fit me.”

“Alright,” said Hank with a deliberate scratch of his scruff.  “That’s great, but consider this: they make more than one type of shirt, Connor.”

Connor furrowed his brow at Hank before dryly asking him, “Then what would you suggest I wear?”

“I don’t know, something with color, maybe?  Like--” Hank searched around before diving for a shirt.  “Like this,” he said, presenting Connor with a shirt whose design could only be described as offensive to the eyes.

“I think you already have that shirt,” said Connor.

“It’s for you, smartass,” Hank replied.  “Do you like it or not?”

“Let’s keep looking,” Connor suggested.  

After much debate and nearly continuous prodding from Hank, Connor decided on a second dress shirt, a plain sweater, and a pair of jeans.

“You dress like a mathlete,” Hank informed him.  “But it’s better than nothing. What’s that come to, thirty bucks?”

“Sixteen fifty with the sale,” Connor easily replied.

“Oh, right, the sale,” said Hank, brightening.  “Great. Hold onto that stuff for a minute. I’m just gonna go look at--”

“Hold it right there.”

Hank and Connor immediately looked to the store’s entrance, where the store’s owner had situated herself between the boy and the door.  

“Those don’t look like the shoes you walked in with,” the woman said, crossing her arms.  “What’s that about?”

“I’m just-- I’m trying them on,” the boy stammered.  “That’s all, I was just--”

“Taking them outside for a test run?”

“I wasn’t going outside!”

The two argued back and forth just as long as it took Hank to cross the store and ask, “Is there a problem here?”

The store owner faced him with a forced smile.  “I’m sorry for the disturbance, sir. If you need any help, I’ll be right with you, but this is nothing that concerns you.”

Hank pointedly reached into his pocket and flashed his badge before saying, “I think it might concern me.”

Connor watched the color drain from the boy’s face at the sight of the badge, but the woman seemed downright delighted.  “Oh good, a cop,” she said, planting her hands on her hips. “I caught you a thief. Hope you brought your handcuffs.”

Hank screwed up his face and held up his hand.  “Hang on a second,” he said, turning to the boy.  “Care to tell me what’s going on here, son?”

For a fleeting moment, the boy met Connor’s eyes, petrified.  “I was just trying on these shoes,” he repeated, a wobble in his voice.  “I wasn’t stealing anything. It’s not-- It’s not like that!”

The woman rolled her eyes, but Hank nodded along and examined the boy’s shoes.  “They look sharp,” said Hank. “How do they fit?”

“I don’t know,” he timidly answered.  “Fine, I guess?”

“Is that the pair you were going to buy?”

Very hesitantly, the boy nodded.

“Oh please,” the woman muttered.

“How much are these?” Hank asked, turning back to the store owner.

“You’re kidding,” she scoffed.  “You’re the police. This kid was breaking the law, and you’re going to buy--”

“I don’t see anything illegal about trying on some shoes inside a store,” said Hank.  “Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to make a purchase.”

Connor stood back with the boy while the store owner sourly rang up Hank’s purchases, shoes and all.  “There’s a mission on Third Street,” Connor quietly told the boy. “They might be able to help you.”

The boy flushed and clenched his jaw.  “Tell him thanks for the shoes,” he mumbled.  Then, he snatched up his ragged old shoes and hurried outside.  Connor saw him dump the old shoes in a garbage can across the street before he disappeared from view.

Hank returned moments later with a bag hanging over his arm.  “The kid left already, didn’t he?” he tiredly asked.

“I can go after him if you want,” Connor offered, although it didn’t surprise him at all when Hank shook his head.

“Let’s just get out of here,” he sighed, sparing the shop’s owner one last glare.  The bell at the door tinkled behind them as they left. “Do you think that kid was going to steal those shoes, Connor?”

“I don’t know,” said Connor, solemnly following Hank to the car.  “He definitely needed new ones, though.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” said Hank.  “God,” he huffed. “That woman. Do you know those shoes were only worth ten bucks in the first place?  Thinking I should arrest him. Just a damned kid. Jesus, some people...”

Connor considered this while they climbed back into the car.  “He wanted me to thank you for him,” he said once they had settled.  The news brought a grim smile to Hank’s face. “He’s not the only one who owes you thanks, either, Hank,” Connor earnestly continued.  “Having some clothes of my own-- It’s helpful, to say the least. You didn’t have to do that for me, but you did. Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

Hank had to clear his throat before he said, “I didn’t know they made androids so damned sappy.”

A laugh escaped Connor, then.  It was a wisp of a sound, but a laugh nonetheless.  “I didn’t either,” he confessed, and he meant it.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank is sentimental, and Connor sees a familiar face.

The streets of downtown Detroit were more brightly decorated than they had ever been, according to Connor’s memory.  Bright red bows adorned every street lamp. Garlands of synthetic pine needles hung in many shop windows. Even in the snow-brightened light of day, Connor could pick out strings of decorative LEDs if he looked closely enough at the various buildings that flew past the car window.

“Is it like this every holiday season?” Connor asked, scarcely tearing his eyes away from the decorations to glance at Hank.

“Unfortunately,” Hank grumbled.

Connor really did look at him, then, a question in the tilt of his head.

Hank let out a clipped breath and shrugged.  “It’s just a shitty marketing ploy, if you ask me,” he said.  “You’d think they’d back off after everything that’s gone down lately, but no!  Instead, my tax dollars get to go to all this fucking tinsel.”

There was something else behind Hank’s distaste for the season that Connor couldn’t quite place, but he had several theories, all of them rooted in tragedy.  “You don’t observe any holidays, then?” he carefully asked.

“Used to do Christmas,” said Hank, tightening his grip on the steering wheel.  “Don’t anymore. Actually,” he continued, “I’ve taken up my own tradition.”

“What’s that?” Connor asked, intrigued.

The corner of Hank’s mouth twitched upwards.  “I start drinking on Christmas Eve and keep going until New Year’s.  That way, I get to be hungover on the first just like everyone else, and I get to skip all the holly-jolly bullshit in the process.”

Hank grinned with the air of a man who had just delivered the punchline to some dark-tinted joke, but Connor couldn’t find the humor in it.

Just before Connor could begin searching for local grief counselors, Hank broke the silence.  “Hey,” he said. “You don’t really know about Christmas, do you?”

“I know of it,” Connor explained.  “I know what day it’s on and what traditions are commonly celebrated.  So,” he shrugged, “I know about Christmas, hypothetically speaking.”

Hank snorted a laugh, tension rapidly leaving him.  “Well, just wait a few days,” he said. “You’ll be as sick of it as me in no time, no worries.  Shit’s everywhere.”

“Looks like it,” Connor agreed, once again turning to marvel out the window at all the bright colors and displays.  It had entranced him so thoroughly he almost didn’t hear Hank sigh. He wouldn’t have mentioned it, but then Hank made first one wrong left turn, and then another.  They had nearly circled the entire block before Connor spoke up. “We’re going in circles,” he bluntly pointed out. “Is something wrong?” 

“Nothing’s wrong,” Hank snapped.  “I just realized there’s somewhere we need to go before we go back home.”

Connor ignored the tenuous warmth that that word-- home-- produced inside of him and instead asked, “Should I start guessing, or are you going to tell me where we’re going, this time?”

“Jesus, Connor, can’t you handle five minutes of suspense?” Hank griped.

“So it’s within five minutes of here,” said Connor, already beginning his analyses.

“Stop that!” said Hank, shooting Connor a scowl.  “Just--chill out. Enjoy the scenery or something.  You’ll see when we get there.”

When five minutes passed and they arrived at the nearest park, Connor didn’t mention that he had already figured it out.  Hank seemed to suspect him anyway.

“Here we are,” Hank announced as he parked his car on the curb. “It’s cold as hell, but there’s something you need to see.  Come on.”

“Wait,” Connor stopped him.  Before Hank could voice the question written on his face, Connor unbuckled his seatbelt and twisted around to grab the bag of clothes from the back seat.  Hank rolled his eyes at Connor as he shimmied out of his burdensome coat and into the sweater he’d picked out at the store.

“Feel better?” Hank drawled.

Connor examined his vague reflection in the window.  The sweater fit just as nicely as he had predicted it would, but his LED had poked out from beneath the edge of his cap.  He carefully covered it again and nodded at his own reflection. Now, he not only passed for human, but for sensibly dressed as well.  “Yes,” Connor cheerfully replied. “Much better. Let’s go.”

Hank couldn’t help but snicker as they exited the car.  “I can only imagine how much time you’d spend in front of the mirror if you were human,” he teased him, earning him a deep frown.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothin’, Princess,” Hank assured him.  “Now make sure you get a good look at all this,” he added with a broad gesture at the park.  “That’s what we’re here for.” 

Brushing off his faint defensiveness, Connor performed a scan.  

There were far more people there than he would have liked, even in spite of the frigid weather.  Far ahead on the path was a young couple with a little girl holding tight to them both with mittened hands.  In closer proximity to Connor and Hank were a jogger who seemed to be heading back to their car, a middle-aged man travelling in that same direction, and two women purchasing hot chocolate from a vendor under a pavillion.  Connor doubted the women realized that they were purchasing drinks from an android, but he wasn’t about to tell them otherwise. 

After he had scanned all the people, he finally turned his attention to the scenery.  Snow clung to bows and garlands strung around every fence post and structure. As in the streets, lights were likewise wrapped around every tree and light post.  Wreaths hung on the back of every bench in sight. Although he couldn’t see it, Connor imagined that the rest of the park beyond the limits of his scan had been decorated with just as much vigor.

“I think I like it,” he admitted, releasing the scan.  “It’s… cheerful, almost.”

Hank nodded at the pavement as they meandered along.  “I thought you’d say something like that,” he said.

Connor let his eyes wander further over the snow-capped scene.  If he looked too high over the trees and decorations of the park, he could see skyscrapers.  CyberLife tower loomed over it all in the far distance like a sentinel in the mist, casting an odd gloom over the pleasant air of the park.  “Is this what you wanted to show me?” he asked, turning back to Hank.

“We’re getting to that,” Hank impatiently assured him.  “There’s something else here. Hang on a sec. I need something warm.”  With that, Hank made for the hot chocolate vendor camped out under the pavilion.

Connor followed along, taking his time as Hank hurried ahead against the cold.

“Good afternoon, fellas!” the android called.  In spite of his missing LED and altered appearance, Connor immediately recognized him as a popular retail worker model.  “Nice day for some hot chocolate, isn’t it?”

“Sure is,” Hank agreed, pulling out his wallet.  “Just one, thanks.”

“You sure?” the android prompted him.  “If your buddy here gets one, it’s half priced.”  He looked to Connor with a grin and said, “Nothing warms you up like a--”

Connor tensed as recognition flashed across the android’s rapidly-slackening face.  They locked eyes.

“You’re…”

“I’m Connor,” Connor awkwardly informed him, shuffling on his feet.

“I know!” the android replied, a genuine smile cracking his face for the first time since they’d walked up.  “I recognized you from the news! You were with Markus! You--”

Hank leaned in closer to the android and hissed, “Could you say it any louder?”

The android blinked at him, startled.

“I would, erm, prefer to keep a low profile,” Connor supplied, quickly glancing around for anyone who might have heard.  “I’m sure you understand.” 

“Oh, of course!” the vendor replied, finally sheepish.  “Sorry! I just-- thank you,” he said, splitting his earnest grin between Hank and Connor both.  “Thank you for everything. The drink is free.”

“Uh,” said Hank, hesitantly taking the proffered drink.  “Alright. Thanks, and, uh,” he pursed his lips, nonplussed.  “Take care.”

“It was nice meeting you--” Connor glanced down at the android’s name tag and then back into the android’s eyes-- “Kyle.”  He offered Kyle a parting smile before he and Hank turned away.

When they had travelled a suitable distance away from the starstruck android, Hank nudged Connor and said, “You have fans.”

“It seems I do,” said Connor, crossing his arms in baffled bewilderment.  He glanced back at Kyle and added, “I wonder how many more there are.”

Hank took a sip at his free drink and said, “A lot, I hope.”

Connor rolled his eyes.  “Hank, this isn’t a good thing,” he said, keeping his voice low.  “For every android out there who admires me, there are going to be ten more who know how badly I screwed everyone else over back at Jericho, and they’re going to hate me for it.”

Hank opened his mouth to throw back some tart reply, but the young family had just come within earshot, and so he thought better of it.  “Look,” he sighed. “Kid. You did what you had to do. Once things settle down, then you can start worrying about what people think of you.  ‘Til then,” he said, “try to live in the moment.”

Connor followed Hank’s broad gesture at the world around them.  Their feet had carried them further into the park as they had chatted.  Between the naked trees, at the end of the slushy path, Connor discovered a massive tree that had been decorated from top to bottom with lights and tinsel and baubles galore. A family-- two women and a teen-- laughed at themselves as they struggled to take a picture of themselves in front of the barrier surrounding the tree, and when they finally managed, the split-second flash revealed millions of watery snow crystals resting on the synthetic leaves.

The little family had moved on by the time Connor and Hank reached the tree.  They were close enough now that Connor could clearly examine the ornaments on the tree.  The grand majority of them appeared to have been supplied by corporate sponsors: tiny tires from a local dealership, decorative instruments provided by a jazz club, bland ornaments advertising banks and insurance companies.  Nearly half the ornaments on the tree, however, were oversized replicas of android LEDs, cycling from red to yellow to blue, courtesy of CyberLife. 

“Tacky,” Hank grunted, pacing around the tree’s base.  “But it’s kind of pretty if you don’t think about it too hard.  This is one of the bigger displays in the city,” he went on. “It’s mostly an advertising gimmick, but look here.”  Connor joined Hank at the barrier and looked with him at the lowest ornaments on the tree. “It’s pretty popular for kids and families to add their own decorations.  Like, here’s a little bottle cap snowman someone made.”

A quick inspection of the snowman revealed that it was composed entirely of beer bottle caps painted white and held together with glue.  Scattered all around it were a variety of crafty ornaments that ranged in aesthetic from professional to abstract, pipe-cleaner reindeer and 3D-printed snowflakes and metalwork candy-canes alike.  Further around the tree, where the family had been before, Connor spotted a miniature wreath woven of yarn in every color of the rainbow.

He spent a while longer examining all the carefully crafted ornaments when a new image crossed his mind: Hank and his wife, there with Cole to display something they had put together with as much love and attention as they had given the toy car in Hank’s basement.

The wistful glaze over Hank’s eyes confirmed to Connor what his imagination had told him.

“It’s all very human,” he told Hank, keeping his voice light.

“You know what,” Hank agreed, nodding up at the tree, “I guess it is.”

“Thank you for bringing me here,” said Connor.  “I like it.”

Hank puffed out a laugh.  “I figured you might,” he fondly replied.  “Now, if you’re done looking, I’d like to get back to the car, where it’s warm.”

Connor took one last good look at the tree just to make sure he had a solid image of it for his archives.  “Yeah,” he said at last, blinking back at Hank. “I’m done. Let’s go.”

The rest of the park seemed somehow much more natural on the journey back.  The trees, despite their lights, couldn’t compare to the artificial splendor of the one at their backs.  Through the trees, in the distance, Connor spotted a woman stepping along another path. Her stride was purposeful, almost regal, and although Connor was sure she hadn’t seen him, she soon stopped, turned, and met Connor’s eyes.

He recognized her instantly.

“Hank,” he breathed, frozen to the spot.  With a shaky hand, he blindly reached for Hank, too stunned to look away from Amanda for even a second.  “That woman,” he whispered. “There, in the trees-- she shouldn’t be here.”

Alarmed, Hank peered over Connor’s shoulder, his brows knit.  “What the hell are you talking about?” he said.

Amanda’s gaze pierced Connor for an eternity.  He couldn’t look away, didn’t dare even blink, until Amanda instead broke the stare.  She slid her gaze over and up, raised her hand, and pointed.

“Connor, there’s nobody out there,” Hank fervently insisted, his words falling on deaf ears.

Connor forced his eyes away from Amanda to look where she pointed.  When he lifted his gaze, he found CyberLife tower where it loomed on the horizon.  

“Connor,” Hank pleaded.  “Answer me, damn it! What’s going on?  What’s the matter?”

“She’s gone,” Connor breathed, and it was true.  As he scanned the desolate trees ahead of them for any sign of her, he knew she had vanished the moment he had looked away.  A sickening realization told him that he knew exactly where she would be if he wanted to find her again. 

“Who’s ‘she’?” Hank demanded.

“Nobody.”

“Connor!”

“I’ll tell you later,” said Connor, rushing past Hank, unsure whether or not he had just lied.  “I need to think.”

After spitting out a curse, Hank rushed after him back the way they had come. 


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Connor doesn't notice that Hank's luck seems to vary wildly from moment to moment.

“Connor, slow down.”

She had looked right at him.  Hank hadn’t seen her, but Amanda had been right there, clear as day.  Connor knew she was in his head, knew that she was only a program that lived inside of him, the ghost of a woman who could possess him at any moment--

But she hadn’t, Connor fervently reminded himself.  She had only appeared in the middle of the day, had only pointed at CyberLife tower, and Connor had no idea why.

“Connor!” Hank called, wrenching him around by the shoulder.  “Kid, look at me,” he said, holding him firmly in place there in the middle of the park, grounding him.  “Look, this isn’t something I can just brush off,” he said, shaking his head in concern. “If you’re seeing things--”

“Hank, we’re causing a scene,” Connor quietly informed him, breaking away from Hank’s worried eyes to glance around at the staring onlookers.  “Let’s not do this here.”

Hank finally noticed the unwanted attention and clenched his jaw.  “Alright, alright,” he conceded, releasing Connor. “We’re not done, though.  As soon as we get home--”

“I get it,” Connor muttered, walking off ahead of Hank, who followed him in a subdued temper.

The two of them continued to the car in tense silence, all the joy of the park sufficiently dampened.  It was completely shattered, however, when they saw what had happened to Hank’s car while they were away.

Connor squinted to analyze the graffiti scrawled across the side of Hank’s car.  It was old fashioned-- actual spray paint, not the digital variety-- and it read, “NO MORE ANDROID”.  More than that, it was still wet, likely only minutes old. A bitter pang of familiarity shot through Connor at the words, but he suppressed it.  Scanning the immediate area for potential suspects was more important than analyzing his feelings. 

The culprit, it seemed, had already fled the scene.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Hank exclaimed, balling up his fists in his hair.  “The fuck is this shit?”

Connor folded his arms together and suggested, “I think somebody noticed me with you.”

“No shit!”

Connor chewed on his lip and searched guiltily around before spotting the android he had met before.  “I’ll go see if Kyle saw anything,” he haltingly announced, stepping away from Hank where he fumed.

“Yeah, do that!” Hank exclaimed.  “Jesus, fuck!” 

Connor trudged back over to the pavillion, ducking under the stares of passersby.  “Kyle,” he called as soon as he got close enough. “Do you have a minute?”

“Um, yeah!” he said, nervously fiddling with a washcloth.  “Do you need something?”

“My friend’s car was vandalized just a few minutes ago,” Connor told him.  “Did you happen to see anything?”

Kyle’s face twitched in trepidation.  “Well,” he tremulously began. “Maybe-- Maybe something.”

With a brief check that nobody was watching, Connor extended his hand and pulled back his synthetic skin.  “Can you show me?” he asked, eyes wide, sincere.

Kyle unsteadily reached out, hesitated, pulled away, and then, after intense deliberation, finally took Connor’s hand.  When the connection opened, Connor’s vision was instantly filled with the static memory being shown to him.

The very same man that Connor and Hank had passed earlier on the path circled Hank’s car not once, but twice.  Seemingly vindicated, the man disappeared. Kyle looked away to greet some potential customers, but when he looked back at the car less than a minute later, the man had returned with a bottle of spray paint.  Then, Kyle had stood by and watched while the man had vandalized Hank’s car.

“I know I should have done something!” Kyle blurted the second the connection broke.  “At first I thought it was nothing, but then it all happened so fast, and-- I thought he might attack me if I interfered, Connor.  I’ve never been in a real fight, and-- and not everyone gets to be a specialized model like you!”

Connor only sighed and shook his head.  “You’ve given me everything I need to catch the man who did this,” he said, turning his back on Kyle and his excuses.  “Thanks for the help.”

By the time Connor returned to the scene of the crime, Hank had managed to collect himself just enough to be civil in asking Connor, “Anything?” 

“He saw the whole thing,” said Connor.

Hank barked out a cold laugh.  “Maybe there is a God.”

“I have enough evidence to press charges,” Connor distractedly continued, grimacing at the words that had begun to dribble down the metal siding of Hank’s car.  He cut his eyes over to meet Hank’s before he added, “That is, if that’s what you want to do.”

“I ain’t gonna let some punk mark up my car,” Hank declared.  “I’ll bag that piece of shit myself!” His choice obvious, he slid into the car and slammed the door.

Connor followed suit, grateful that Amanda had, for at least the time being, escaped Hank’s realm of concern.  He tried not to dwell on the fact that the paint seemed to bother Hank more than the message it spelled out. To busy himself, Connor began running a barrage of scans on the suspect.

The ride to the police station was short and tense, peppered with profanity and generous distribution of rude gestures to anyone who dared to look at Hank’s car for more than half a second.  Hank skidded to a halt in his usual spot around the back of the building and wrestled the key out of the ignition. “Fucking asshole,” Hank muttered. “Did you get the bastard’s name, yet?”

“Ian Jenkins,” Connor easily supplied.  He could have given Hank the man’s life story, by this point.

“Ian Jenkins can suck my dick,” Hank growled, angrily pulling himself out of his car before slamming the door.

Connor reluctantly straightened up his sweater and his cap and, after much internal debate, followed Hank inside the police station.

Hank marched unnoticed through the reception area, where the solitary human receptionist was frantically doing the work of six androids.  There was no guard, android or otherwise, in place to prevent Hank and Connor from barging into bullpen. The area was completely desolate aside from Officer Chen, who was taking down what appeared to be her thousandth witness report that day.  Everybody else, Connor figured, must have been busy putting out fires all around Detroit. Aside from Officer Chen, there was Captain Fowler looming in his office, juggling a phone call, a notepad, and an intense conversation with one Detective Gavin Reed.

Officer Chen stopped mid-sentence when she spotted Connor and Hank, but rather than abandon her duties to question their presence, she merely sighed, rolled her eyes, and continued placating the incensed citizen seated across from her.

“Let’s get this thing out of the way,” Hank muttered, dropping himself at his desk.  “I’ll file my own damned report, and if anybody mentions anything--”

“Anderson!” Captain Fowler bellowed from the doorway of his office, causing everyone in the vicinity to jump.  Hank went rigid. “What in God’s name are you doing here? And who the hell is--” Fowler seemed to age a year in the moment it took him to identify the illegally-dressed android in his presence.  “My office,” he breathed, deathly serious. “Right now.”

Hank pressed out a long sigh and wordlessly obeyed him.  Unsure of what else to do, Connor followed, senses on high alert.  Gavin had propped himself up against the glass wall of Fowler’s office and was watching them approach with something that teetered on the border between disbelief and glee.

“Anderson,” Captain Fowler began before they had even crossed the threshold.  “I’m going to give you about thirty seconds,” he patiently explained. “If you haven’t given me a good reason as to why the hell you’re here with that thing--” he jabbed at Connor, who clenched his jaw-- “dressed up in civilian clothes, while you’re still fucking suspended,” he pointedly added, “I’m going to take your badge and kick your ass out the door myself.  Are we clear?” Fowler leaned against his desk and pinned Hank through with an austere frown. “Start talking.”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t fucking have to be,” Hank started, defensive.

“Then go the fuck home,” said Fowler, “because we’ve been too goddamned slammed for the past three weeks to have time for your bullshit today.”

“I’m filing a report, okay?” Hank huffed.  Gavin audibly snorted, and even Fowler was in the middle of an eye roll when Hank shouted, “My fucking car got fucking vandalized!  Happy?”

“Oh,” Gavin laughed, “Oh, this is-- wow,” he chuckled.  “You know Anderson, it doesn’t count as vandalism if you just can’t remember driving it into a telephone pole.”

“Fuck off, Gavin,” said Hank.  “It was graffiti. Fucking spray paint.” 

“For real?” Fowler mirthlessly laughed as Hank fumed.  “Alright Hank, you know what? I could use a break. Show me your car-- I’m sorry, the evidence,” he very professionally corrected himself, “and maybe I’ll disregard all the protocol you’re breaking by being here just long enough to indulge in some schadenfreude.”

“Fine, if that’s what it takes to get a damned report filed around here,” Hank complained, throwing a sour look around the room.  “I’m parked out back.”

Connor briefly considered offering to produce an image of Hank’s car on his hand, but the thought of so much scrutiny-- especially when everyone else seemed to have largely forgotten him-- made him reconsider drawing any attention to himself.  So, he cautiously joined the end of the line as Hank paraded them all out of the station to see the evidence.

“Let’s get a look at this,” said Gavin, who had tagged along for no discernible reason other than to revel in Hank’s misfortune firsthand.  “What did they do to your precious piece of-- oh my God.” The moment the words on the side of Hank’s car came into view, Gavin nearly doubled over.  “No more-- oh my God, the fuckin’ irony!”

“It’s not that fucking funny, you fucking asshole,” Hank muttered.

“No more android,” Fowler calmly read.  There was more amusement in his eyes than Connor had ever detected before, although that hadn’t been a very difficult level to surpass in the first place.  “Sounds like something you’d write yourself, Hank.”

“Not on my fucking car!” Hank protested.

“No, but you sure don’t mind it in other places, do you, Anderson?” Gavin gleefully pointed out, circling the car just as the man who had vandalized it had done.  “It’s on a sticker on your own fucking desk. Now your car matches!”

At Hank’s silence, Connor took a subtle step backwards and drew his arms tighter around himself. 

“I guess someone saw you hanging around with the plastic prick and, well,” Gavin continued with a chuckle, “I guess they got the wrong idea about you.  Must think you started liking androids, or something-- but don’t worry. We know better,” he assured Hank, tossing Connor a derisive smirk. “Since the day this thing started following you around, you haven’t once stopped bitching about it.”

“Shut the fuck up, Gavin,” said Hank, his face rapidly reddening.  “Just shut your goddamn mouth before I shut it for you.”

“What, are you gonna sic your-- your rogue little robot on me?” Gavin laughed.  “Go ahead, tell your broken toy to--”

“That’s enough, you two!” said Fowler, interrupting Gavin before he could goad Hank into throwing a punch-- and Connor had calculated with 99% surety that Hank would have thrown a punch given much more prompting.  Connor was much less sure about whether or not he would have stopped him, or whether he would have broken Gavin’s nose himself. As things were, he only stood there, as he always had, simmering in silence. “Did you see who did this?” Fowler asked, turning to Hank.  “Do you have any more evidence than this? Because there’s next to nothing we can do if you don’t.”

Hank shot a lingering glare at Gavin before he said,  “Connor saw the whole thing. Well-- kind of. There was this other android, a witness, and they did that thing where-- with the-- look,” Hank impatiently continued.  “The guy’s name is Ian Jenkins. I’m pressing charges. Connor has all the evidence. Let’s skip on over the red tape and get to the part where justice is served, shall we?”

Captain Fowler crossed his arms and appraised first Hank, and then his car, and then Connor.  His discerning gaze lingered on Connor the longest. Connor returned his stare with steel. “Reed,” he finally said, not sparing the detective a glance.  “You have work to do. Get to it.”

Gavin flicked his eyes between Fowler and everyone else before he sighed out, “Sure thing, Captain.”

Fowler waited patiently for Gavin to disappear into the station before he looked up and asked, “Hank, do you want to know why you still have a job?”

“What the hell does that have to do with--”

“Well I’ll tell you,” Fowler went on, glowering at Hank.  “You were one of the best cops this city has ever seen,” he said.  “Were. Past tense. For the past three years, your career has absolutely tanked.”

Hank grit his teeth.

“You’ve been late, drunk, what else?” said Fowler, starting up a list on his fingers.  “Damaged station property, fist fights, improper workplace conduct--”

“I thought you were telling me why I still have a job,” Hank impatiently reminded him.

“Fine,” Fowler relented.  He slowly lowered his arm, pointed at Hank, and then very deliberately swung his arm so that his finger was levelled at Connor’s chest instead.  “Now, this might just be coincidence, but ever since this android showed up, you’ve done some of the best work I’ve seen you do in years.”

“The hell are you talking about, Jeffrey?” Hank asked, incredulous.  “I don’t know if you noticed, but I was chasing my tail the whole damned time while he did all the work!”

“That’s not true,” said Connor, breaking his silence for the first time since they had arrived.  “You were very helpful at the Eden club.”

“Connor, you are not helping my case,” Hank grumbled.

Fowler simply ignored them.  “It’s not what you did, Hank,” he said.  “It’s how you did it. You bitched so hard when you were taken off the deviancy case--” he laughed.  “I haven’t seen passion like that since your big red ice bust! In fact, you were so damned passionate that you socked a fucking FBI agent for it!”  Somehow, Fowler was still grinning. “Let me tell you, I had to pull on every string I could reach just to let you keep your damned badge, do you realize that?  But for once, I was glad to do it.”

Hank shuffled around and scowled at the pavement, entirely unsure of himself.

“Hank,” said Fowler.  “Let me make you a deal.  I’ll let you off suspension early on two conditions.”  Hank’s head shot up, then, and even Connor’s face betrayed some shock.  “One: you work through the holidays. We’re so damned understaffed right now that it isn’t even funny, and some of us want a day off before next year gets here.”

“Well, alright,” Hank slowly replied, scratching his beard.  “I guess I can do that. It’s not like I have anything better to do.”

“Exactly,” Fowler nodded.  “So here’s the second thing.  Legally, I can’t let the android work any cases,” he said, gesturing at Connor.  “But it seems to be kicking your ass into shape, so this is how things are going to work.  I’m gonna mark it down as a consultant, and Hank, you’re going to keep it under wraps that you’re working with an android until such a time comes that that’s not frowned upon anymore.  Got it?” he asked. “Don’t even tell anyone around the department, if you can help it.”

“Is that all?” said Hank, dumbfounded.

“Yep,” Fowler replied.  “Well-- that, but just so you know, you’ll be pushing pencils ‘til 2045 if you make me regret this.”

“Naturally,” Hank drawled. 

There was an odd buzzing in Connor’s chest that made him ask, “So I’ll be allowed to work cases as well?”

Fowler, then, was forced to directly address Connor-- an action to which he was clearly unaccustomed.  “Unofficially, yes. I can’t let you go running around crime scenes or anything, not legally, but if Hank happens to let you in on some classified details, I don’t have to know about it.  Oh,” he added, scratching his nose. “Try not to hang around the station, either, unless you really have to. It looks bad.” He shrugged. “You understand.”

“Oh, sure,” said Connor, crossing his arms.  He could do their work, as long as they didn’t have to look at him.  “And consultants,” he asked. “They don’t happen to get paid, do they?”

It appeared as though this was a brand new concept to both Hank and Fowler, who took their time processing the question.

“No,” Fowler replied after some consideration.  “They don’t.”

“Then I refuse.”

It was a gamble.  Connor knew it was, but he felt contrary and defensive and, more than that, was particularly well-versed in risk.  He had judged correctly, based on Hank’s disbelief and, more importantly, Fowler’s barely-concealed desperation.

“Connor, you can’t be serious!” Hank exclaimed.

“Androids aren’t legally even people,” Fowler attempted to reason with him.  “How can I get you a paycheck?”

“That’s something you’ll have to figure out if you want me to work for you, now isn’t it?”

Hank was goggling at him by this point, and Fowler himself had taken on a countenance of indignation.

“Hold on,” Fowler insisted, sweating in spite of the cold.  “Just-- Okay, okay,” he said, visibly wracking his brain for some solution.  “How about-- Listen,” he decided. “I’ll line Hank up for a raise-- God only knows how I’ll get that through finances-- but he can split it with you.  That way you’ll-- you’ll get something. Does that work?” 

The arrangement wasn’t ideal, but Connor didn’t even particularly care about the money-- especially not as much as Hank appeared to care about it in that moment.  Money was useful. He would need it, at some point, to purchase thirium or parts for himself. That was inevitable. Connor, however, cared much more about the work that he would be doing, and about how the people he worked for and with treated him while he did it.

A paycheck wouldn’t fix Gavin’s attitude or remove Hank’s anti-android stickers, but it was a start.

“If that’s the best you can do,” Connor conceded, much to everyone’s relief.

“Great,” Hank breathed.  “Wonderful. We’re back on the case,” he said, nodding to himself.  “Now can our first assignment be nabbing the scumbag who vandalized my car?”

Fowler huffed out a weary laugh and said, “Why the hell not?”


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Connor tries to be sly and it backfires on him tremendously.

As soon as Connor had uploaded all the relevant evidence through the console on Hank’s desk, he immediately relegated himself to the empty desk adjacent to it and waited for Hank to finish filing his report.  Out of habit, he scanned the room. Officer Chen had finished up with her first witness testimony and was now working on another. Her coffee supply was running dangerously low, which didn’t bode well for the witness.

Captain Fowler had returned to his office after informing Hank that nothing he did today would be on the clock, and so that if he wanted to get paid for his work, he should kindly return tomorrow and not cause any trouble in the meantime.  Fowler was still there in his glass tower, overseeing everything.

Detective Reed, however, was nowhere to be seen.  Connor found himself hoping that he had gone out on a call and wouldn’t be returning anytime soon.  Maybe ever.

He wondered if that’s what it meant to hate somebody.  He wondered if he was capable of hate in the first place.

Connor knew of most of his capabilities, however, and elected to use them to track Ian Jenkins’ location.  He knew the suspect’s phone number. From there, it was a simple matter of remotely enabling the phone’s GPS, and Connor knew exactly where to find him.  If only tracking deviants had been so simple, he marveled. Amanda would have been so much more pleased with him if--

But he wasn’t thinking about Amanda.  He was busy tracking the man who had vandalized Hank’s car.  The fact that he could do both at the same time didn’t matter.

“And… done,” Hank declared with a decisive poke of his tablet.  “Now let’s bag this guy. You got a read on his location, yet?” he asked Connor, his eyebrows raised expectantly.

“Assuming he has his phone on him, then yes,” said Connor.  “But--”

“Well great, then,” said Hank as he abruptly stood.  He twirled on his coat and said, “Let’s go.”

“Hank, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Connor protested even as Hank gleefully made his way out of the station.  “We’re not even on duty yet.”

Hank scoffed.  “Come on, Connor, don’t be a wuss.  Gimme an address.”

Connor was quiet for several long steps.  “Okay,” he said, not looking at Hank. “I’ll give you directions as we go.  He’s still on the move.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Hank chuckled.  The sight of his vandalized vehicle only added to the fervor with which he peeled out of the station parking lot.  He followed Connor’s directions precisely and without complaint, which was an odd change of pace for the both of them.  Connor nearly regretted that it would surely be the last time he would be able to persuade him to do so.

“This place?” asked Hank, swinging his car into the parking lot of Frank’s Auto Style and Repair.  He hooted out a laugh and said, “Oh, the irony. I guess the guy must really like painting up cars.  What, does he work here?” 

“No,” said Connor, not looking at Hank.

“No?  Then--” Hank froze, turned to Connor, and gaped.  “Oh, you lying bastard!”

“I never lied,” said Connor.

“You sneaky--”

“You’re going to be late for your appointment,” Connor informed him.

Hank blinked.  “My what?”

“Your appointment,” Connor repeated.  “I took the liberty of scheduling you one.  Your insurance should reimburse you for the cost of having the graffiti painted over, and I know you don’t want to be driving around with that phrase scrawled onto your car,” he said, searching Hank’s face.  “Do you?”

The steering wheel croaked under the force of Hank’s grip.  “No,” he gruffly admitted.

“Frank’s expecting you.”

Hank clenched his jaw, hissed in a long breath, and then huffed out a quick, “God damn it, Connor,” before wheeling them into the open garage.

Hank begrudgingly passed by the signs and arrows-- The most care with your repair!  Real human hearts make real human art!-- and parked under the digital sign that read “Anderson”.

Hank rolled down his window as a portly man labeled Frank approached the car.

“Hank?” said Frank, leaning inside.  He reeked of cigarettes and oil.

“That’s me.”

“Cash or card?” Frank asked, disinterested in the response.

Hank passed his card through his window, nonplussed.

Frank scanned in the payment and practically threw the card back at Hank.  “Sit tight. Gonna take a while,” he sighed, and then he fell away without another word.

Hank rolled up the window with a scowl.  “Thanks, asshole.”

Very well used to this sort of language, Connor simply leveled a stern frown at Hank and told him, “If you hadn’t gotten it painted, the suspect would have--”

“No, no,” Hank huffed.  “Not you. Him. He’s the asshole.”

“Oh,” said Connor after a pause.

“Seriously though,” Hank went on.  “What the hell’s been wrong with you lately?”

Connor closed his eyes and leaned back.  “Can I convince you not to ask?”

“Like hell.”

Connor grimaced and let out a slow puff of air.  “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.  I’m a prototype,” he said, rolling his head over to look at Hank. “By definition, something’s inherently wrong with me.  Every scan I run says that I’m fine, but that's obviously broken, too. Besides that, I’m a deviant. That’s something else wrong with me.”  There was a low clatter outside, followed by Frank’s muffled swearing. Connor didn’t care to look. “I guess my answer is really going to depend on what you mean by wrong.”

“Well let’s see,” said Hank, his voice gentle in spite of the sarcastic bite of his words.  “Where do I even start? Ignoring the fact that you were seeing things today, you’ve been sneaky and paranoid ever since you’ve been staying with me.  When you cut your hand getting that window, you said-- what was it? A careless mistake?” Hank barked out a listless laugh. “How the hell does Mr. World's Best Android make a careless mistake?  And don't tell me you weren't paying attention. You're so keyed up you jump at everything that moves."

“Maybe I’m not as perfect as you thought,” Connor lowly replied.  He could feel thirium shuddering through his veins as he spoke.

“Yeah, maybe not,” Hank agreed.  “You know you scream in your sleep?”

Connor whipped his head around.  He remembered waking up with wet cheeks and his thirium pump racing, every wire in his body shivering out the ghost of a distress signal, but if he had been crying out, something inside of him must have been malfunctioning horribly.

Hank pressed on through Connor's stunned silence and demanded, “Who the hell is Amanda?”

Connor’s LED blinked red for the briefest moment under his cap.  “How do you--”

“I told you,” Hank huffed.  “You scream in your sleep. Scared me half to death,” he brusquely added.  “So on account of my lost sleep, I deserve to know. Who the hell is Amanda, and what is it about her that scares you so bad?”  At Connor’s grave silence, Hank continued, “You’ve been so high strung these past few days. Maybe if you talk about whatever it is--”

“Because you’re always so willing to talk about your problems,” Connor shot back.  A small, resentful part of him wished that Hank would just get fed up and drop the subject already.

For a split second, it looked as though Connor had won, but Hank shook off whatever petty response had come first to his mind and instead said, “I’m not the one seeing women in the trees, now, am I?  Is that who you saw?” Hank leaned closer in an attempt to catch Connor’s distant gaze. “I have all day, here, Connor. Old Frank still hasn’t found the right color paint.”

Connor glanced into the mirror and saw that Hank had spoken the truth.  He didn’t understand the tightness in his core, even if he had learned to call it dread.  “Yes,” Connor admitted in a near-whisper. “I saw her in the trees. She looked right at me, and then-- But I know she wasn’t really out there,” he haltingly confessed.  “She’s-- for lack of a simpler explanation, she’s in my head.”

“Yeah,” Hank slowly replied.  Concern had begun to drip down his face like a nervous sweat.  “I get that, son, but who is she?”

Connor balled up his fists in frustration.  “No, Hank. She's in my head. Literally. She’s a program stored in the z9-550 core relay processing cluster in my head,” he explained, tapping at the place where the processor would be if Hank had been able to peer into his internal structures.  “She was my handler. She made sure I kept to the mission. Whenever I made a report, I didn’t report directly to CyberLife. I spoke with her.”

“Inside your head?” Hank asked.

“Yes,” Connor patiently explained.  “There’s a virtual location I can access-- it’s a garden, actually-- where I used to meet with her to provide details about the deviancy investigation.  The humans at CyberLife would then be able to keep track of my progress through her. Of course, since she’s always monitoring my actions, once I became a deviant, she--” Connor swallowed.  “I betrayed her, so she attempted to override my systems and finish what I had been unable to accomplish.”

Dull spraying from outside the car filled the heavy pause.  “Override?” Hank repeated. “As in, like, a takeover? As in mind-control?”

“Something like that,” Connor quietly conceded.  “She only ever tried that once, tried to-- to trap me in the garden while she-- I was able to escape before she could--”  Connor stopped and tried to clear the catch in his throat. He could feel Hank’s eyes on him, even though he had long since stopped looking at Hank.  “She tried to use me to assassinate Markus. It was on a stage, during a speech, in front of everyone,” he whispered, knowing that if he raised his voice even a decibel, it would start to quaver.  “There would have been chaos if she had succeeded, but I escaped before she… before she could. I threw away my gun that night,” he said. “It’s at the bottom of the lake, somewhere, but she’s still inside my head.” 

“Shit, Connor,” Hank breathed.  “That’s… fuck.”

Numbly, Connor nodded.  “Like I said, I haven’t seen her since, except in my-- my dreams, as you’d call them, and then today, in the park.  I haven’t tried to go back to the garden.”

“But she didn’t try to take you over or anything today, did she?” Hank asked.

Connor couldn’t help but notice that the concern Hank had worn was already being replaced by apprehension.  Distrust.

“She just looked at me,” said Connor.  “And she pointed at CyberLife tower. I have no idea why.” 

“Maybe she’s trying to get you to turn yourself in,” Hank suggested, scratching at his scruff.  “Maybe she’s… but then, why wouldn’t she just take you over and do it herself?”

“I don’t know,” Connor desperately answered him.  “Maybe she can’t do it again, but I don’t see why that would be the case.  Ever since it happened, I’ve put up a firewall and a rolling scan on my core relay processing cluster that will alert me to any abnormal activity, but--” He hiccuped out a hopeless laugh.  “My scans have always been pretty worthless, haven’t they?” 

Hank shook his head and stared at the steering wheel.  “You can’t just remove that part, can you?” he quietly suggested.

“You could,” Connor bleakly replied.  “It would leave me with the functionality of a cheap calculator, but you could.”

“Okay, not doing that, then,” said Hank, his eyebrows raised high in abrupt disillusionment.  “And there’s no way to, well. Kill her?”

“No,” Connor sighed.  “She’s a part of me, Hank.  She has roots in every last one of my biocomponents.  I can’t get rid of her without effectively turning myself into a brick.”

“So what, then?” Hank asked.  “If she wanted to stop the revolution, that ship has sailed.  The deviancy case is closed. There isn’t a mission left for her to make you carry out.  Why is she still bothering you?”

“I don’t know,” said Connor, hating the taste of those words more every time he uttered them.  “I don’t know what she wants, Hank. I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t be sorry, kid,” Hank breathed.  “Just-- if she--” He chewed on his lip, choosing his words carefully.  “If she can take control of you at any moment, like you said, how do I know she isn’t controlling you right now?”

A knock at the window sent them both jolting in their seats.

“All done!” Frank shouted through the car door.

Hank muttered a curse, gritted his teeth, and gave Frank a stiff smile and a stiffer wave.  He stepped out of the car to inspect the paint job. Connor watched him circle the car through the mirrors, somehow both appreciating and resenting that he seemed to be taking his time.

When Hank returned, he cleared his throat and asked, “What’s the update on Ian Jenkins?” 

“He’s at home,” said Connor, likewise subdued.  “I recommend that we pursue him tomorrow so as to avoid any legal issues with his arrest.”

Wordlessly, Hank nodded and backed out of the garage.

Now that Amanda was no longer his personal secret, Connor wanted to talk about everything almost as badly as he wanted to forget it.  He was grateful when Hank decided to drown out their silence with his music, and whether he wanted to discuss the matter anymore or not, neither of them brought it up for the rest of the day. 


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which justice is served.

It impressed Connor to find that, in spite of the way that Hank insisted on his apathy towards the rules of his job, he actually stepped out of his bedroom the next morning with plenty of time to spare before his shift was supposed to begin.  Connor hadn’t even helped.

Much.

Connor had run out of cases to review just before sunrise, and he had finished bleaching the thirium residue from his dress shirt long before that.  If he had, perhaps, hacked Hank’s phone in order to set an additional alarm or two for him, Hank didn’t need to know.

However, Hank did notice that Connor had arranged all of Hank’s usual breakfast implements on the table for him to see when he stumbled out of the shower.  One clean bowl, one cleanish spoon, one serving of generic wheat circles-- all that remained for Hank to do was to pour in the milk.

An incredulous scowl erupted on Hank’s face when he spotted the table.  “Who are you, and what have you done with Connor?”

Connor, who had since occupied himself entertaining Sumo with a belly rub, froze where he crouched.  With an apprehensive lurch to his feet, he said, “Hank, it’s me.” He showed Hank his hands, a demonstration of his harmlessness.  “You can ask me anything. I’m not Amanda. I—“

“Connor,” Hank tiredly stopped him.  “Relax. It was a joke, alright?”

Connor blinked and felt his pulse slow.  “Oh.”

“Just saying,” Hank went on as he settled himself at the table and tipped some milk into his bowl.  “It ain’t like you to start being so…” He stopped, frowned into his bowl, and dumped in a small mountain of cereal more.  “So helpful all of a sudden,” he continued. “Especially around the house. You’re no domestic.”

“You’re right,” Connor nodded.  “I’m not.” Hank was frowning at him, now, so Connor decided to remind him, ”Your cereal is getting soggy.”

Hank grumbled, but at last relented to eat his breakfast and check his phone.  He took a bite, chewed it, swallowed it. He scrolled. Fifteen seconds passed. He took a second bite.  Thirty seconds passed. Sumo yawned. Forty-five seconds. Hank put down his spoon to type out a text.

“You know,” said Connor, shifting on his feet.  “I’ve been monitoring Ian Jenkins’ phone, and he’s on the move again.  It would be most efficient if--”

“Oh, I get it,” Hank blandly interrupted him, not looking up from his phone.  “You’re not being nice. You’re just trying to get us out of the house so you’ll have something to do again.”

“You can interpret my actions however you’d like, Lieutenant,” Connor brightly answered him.  “Your shift begins in less than an hour.” 

“I’m working on it, chippy,” Hank huffed.  “Look, we’ll be out of here in fifteen minutes.  Sit down and flip your quarter or something.” Connor set a timer for fifteen minutes and reached for a chair.  “Actually,” said Hank. Connor withdrew. “Why don’t you go change into something a little less… android-like? Yeah,” he said, frowning at Connor’s mostly-clean CyberLife jacket.  “We bought those clothes for a reason. Gotta lay low, remember?”

“I suppose,” Connor conceded.  In spite of the illegality of it, plain clothes had their advantages.  He turned to find his clothes when Hank spoke again.

“Maybe do something with that LED of yours, while you’re at it,” he said.  “It pops right off, right?”

“It does,” Connor slowly replied, facing Hank over his shoulder.  “I don’t intend to remove it, though.”

“Why not?”

After a pause, Connor turned away.  “Have you ever thought about waxing away your facial hair, Lieutenant?”

“Why the hell would I--”

“It should pop right off.”  With that, Connor strode away to change his clothes.

By the time Connor’s timer ran out, Hank and Connor were speeding down the road towards the police department.  Ten more minutes passed in relative quiet before, abruptly, Hank barked out a laugh.

“What is it?” Connor asked.

“Nothing, just,” said Hank, “I just figured something out.”

Connor raised his eyebrows, although the effect was somewhat diminished by the cap he had donned to cover his LED.

“You called me Lieutenant this morning,” said Hank, smug.

“Your reaction time is alarmingly slow,” Connor replied.

Hank shot him a dirty look and said, “Shut up.  What I mean is that you haven’t called me that in a long time, and I think I figured out the pattern.”

“The pattern?”

“You know,” Hank elaborated.  “When you call me Hank versus when you call me Lieutenant.”

“Oh, that pattern,” said Connor, amused.  “I highly doubt that.”

“What?  Come on,” Hank scoffed at the road.  “It’s not that complicated.”

“It is that complicated,” Connor insisted.  “It took some of the world’s most decorated artificial intelligence programmers to create that particular algorithm.  It takes into consideration dozens of variables, including social context, environmental factors…”

The rest of Connor’s explanation was lost as he glanced away from Hank and out at the road ahead, where he glimpsed something that forced him to perform a scan.

The world froze around him.  Hank was there beside him in his peripheral, stalled with his mouth partially open.  Outside, bits of gravel and debris hung suspended where the tires had flung them into the air.  A few seagulls hovered motionlessly above the city skyline. Other cars had parked themselves on the highway, and there, in the center of the lane, far ahead of them, was Amanda.

She was walking towards him.

Connor had been frozen just as everything around him had been frozen, a whirring mind in a cage of plastic and metal, but Amanda still moved.  When Connor focused harder, he could make out her face-- stern, yet serene, just like her gait. 

She was closer now.

Connor couldn’t move.

In the remotest region of his mind, Connor wondered what would happen if he were to release the scan that instant.  She wasn’t part of the world outside. Logically, the car would have no effect on her. Would she move through it? Would she linger like an afterimage in his eyes?  Would she disappear entirely? Whatever the case, Connor was too paralyzed to find out. Just as before, her eyes drew him in, holding him until she was only a stone’s throw away.  

Just as before, she stopped, and she pointed.  

Although he couldn’t turn his head or even move his eyes, Connor followed her direction, narrowing his focus up, over, up, and over until Amanda had been lost from view entirely.  He could still feel her pointing. He looked closer at the skyline, and there it was.

CyberLife tower.

Connor widened his focus the moment he registered the building, but Amanda was nowhere to be seen.  He examined everything. Hank, the birds, the dust, the cars-- none of it had moved. A quarter of a millisecond had passed since he had initiated the scan.

Connor thought he felt a whisper in his ear.

“You’re neglecting your mission, Connor.”

Connor wrenched himself from the scan and whirled to look into the backseat.

Of course, there was nobody there.

“Jesus!” Hank gasped, jerking the steering wheel in his fright.  “What the hell did you--”

Connor ran another scan.  Hank’s face had been frozen into a startled contortion.  He had veered slightly into the next lane, but thankfully, there was nobody near enough for that to cause a problem.  Most importantly, however, Amanda was truly gone, at least from his sight.

“--do that for?”

Connor took a moment to recollect himself and allowed Hank to correct his course.  Then, pointlessly, he cleared his throat. “Something startled me,” he said.

“No shit!” Hank retorted, checking his mirrors for anyone he may have inadvertently run off the road.  “Care to fucking elaborate?”

“Not particularly,” said Connor.

“Jesus,” Hank huffed with a shake of his head.  “Keep this up and I’m sending you to a shrink.”

“Alright,” said Connor.  “After you.” 

With that, Connor was able to witness the exact moment when Hank’s humor curdled into genuine ire.  “What the fuck crawled up your plastic ass and died?” he spat. “You were fine ten fucking seconds ago.”

“I saw her again,” Connor blurted, silencing Hank.  Connor kept his eyes fixed on the skyline. “Just now.  In the road,” he explained. “I saw her again. She was in my head, in a scan.  It-- I just got startled,” he admitted, forcing the words past his tongue. “That’s all.”

A long, weary breath escaped Hank, then.  “Listen,” he said. “After we bag this Jenkins guy, I think you should call a cab and head back early.”  Connor stared at him. “Rest up, you know, maybe figure out-- figure out what to do about your… problem.”

“That isn’t going to solve anything, Hank.”

“Well it sure couldn’t hurt.  Look, Fowler’s probably going to have me--”

“I can still do my job!” 

Hank fixed him with a perturbed glance.  “I’m sure you can, kid,” he said at last.  “Just… Take it easy.”

It was then that Connor realized how tense he had become.  He forced his shoulders down and his jaw to unclench itself, although his mind raced the whole way to the station.  If Hank truly wasn’t doubting Connor’s abilities, and if he knew Connor wasn’t going to get any better just sitting around, Connor could deduce only one other reason why he would suggest sending him home.

No, Connor corrected himself.  Sending him away.

He stayed in the car while Hank enlisted a human backup officer from the station.  It was protocol, after all, and Connor was in no position to act in such a capacity, even if he was the one with Ian Jenkins’ GPS on lockdown.  

“Turn left at the light,” Connor mechanically directed.

“Has he moved?”

“Not since the last time you asked me, twenty-seven seconds ago,” Connor replied.  “He seems to have arrived at work.”

Hank stepped on the gas, a vengeful gleam in his eye.  The patrol car behind them likewise accelerated, although Connor couldn’t imagine the officer they had dragged along was nearly as thrilled with the assignment as Hank.  

Connor himself couldn’t feel a single ounce of excitement within himself, even as they parked across the street from the suspect’s place of employment-- although he was beginning to realize the irony in that the man they were booking for spraying an anti-android slogan on Hank’s car made a living working at a second-hand android parts store.

“You sure this is the place?” Hank asked.  “Not, you know, another trick to get me to buy you some spare parts, or something?”

“I’m sure,” Connor replied.  As a silent demonstration of proof, he produced a holographic map on his palm and directed Hank’s attention towards the blinking blip that was Ian Jenkins.  “His phone is here, at least.”

“That’s good enough for me,” said Hank as he unbuckled himself.  “I guess you’ve gotta sit this one out, though. Sorry Connor,” Hank shrugged.  “This needs to be a clean arrest, and an android consultant can’t be... Well. You know how it is.”  Hank gifted Connor with a hearty pat on the shoulder before he ducked out of the car. Connor watched through the mirror as Hank and Officer Person exchanged a few muffled words, nodded at each other, and marched into the store. 

An odd bitterness settled in Connor’s throat as he watched them go.  He should be in there, he considered, not to replace Hank or Officer Person, but to aid them.  It was his job.

_ You’re neglecting your mission, Connor. _

Connor’s system shuddered back a distress signal at the memory.  She couldn’t have meant this, he thought. As far as Amanda had ever been concerned, Connor had no business concerning himself with humans unless they were helping him investigate deviancy or standing in his way.  His mission had been to get to the root of deviancy so that it could be killed in its cradle and not grow into the revolutionary beast it had become. Connor had failed.

_ You’re neglecting your mission, Connor. _

Except he didn’t have a mission left.  He was obsolete. Worse-- He was defective, but for some reason he couldn’t fathom, Amanda seemed to believe he still had a job to do.

A minute later, Ian Jenkins came tumbling out of the store, handcuffed, Hank and Officer Person handling him, one on each side.  Nobody looked happier about this than Hank, who seemed to be giving Mr. Jenkins some smug advice about vandalism while onlookers gawked.  Between Hank and Officer Person, the situation seemed to be perfectly handled.

Connor ordered a taxi. 

“God, that felt good,” Hank declared as he slid back into the car and started up the engine.  He threw a victory wave at Officer Person before he peeled out onto the road towards the station, music blaring.  A song and a half later, he finally turned down the music and nodded at Connor. “Hey,” he said. “Thanks for your help.”  

Skeptical, Connor passed him a narrow-eyed glance.  

“I mean it, Connor,” Hank went on.  “I wouldn’t have had a clue where to even start looking for this guy if it hadn’t been for you.”

At that, Connor managed a smile.  “I guess I don’t make a bad consultant, do I?” he asked.

“Not bad at all,” Hank agreed, likewise grinning.  “And that’s all the more reason you should take the rest of the day off.  Like I was saying earlier,” he explained, “Fowler’s probably going to have me taking witness statements and running paperwork for the rest of the day.”

Hank seemed to have several more excuses lined up behind that one, but Connor held up his hand to stop them before they saw the light of day.  “I hear you loud and clear,” said Connor, much to Hank’s astonishment. “In fact, I already called a taxi. If I’m not mistaken, it’s the one parked out in front of the station right now.”

Just as Connor said, a taxi marked “RESERVED” sat idling by the police department’s front entrance.

“Oh.  That’s-- Huh,” said Hank, pulling off into the station’s parking lot.  “That’s great,” he finally declared. “Alright, well then, uh,” he said.  “I’ll be home after my shift, I guess. Oh!” he added, his eyes widening. “There’s a spare key in-- it’s in a little flowerpot on the windowsill out back.  Just so you know. You don’t have to use the window.”

“I’ll remember that,” Connor earnestly replied.  “Thanks, Lieutenant.” He then nodded out the window to where Officer Person had just pulled up and added, “It looks like I better be going.”

“Oh, shit, yeah,” Hank replied, peering out the window.  “Well, see you!”

The two of them stepped out of the car, and while Connor made for the front of the building, Hank headed in the opposite direction, towards Officer Person and the rest of his workday.

Connor gave Hank one last glance before he stepped into his taxi.

“Thank you for choosing Detroit City Taxis,” said the taxi.  “This taxi is reserved for use. Please state your name, or use the panel to--”

Connor placed his hand on the interface panel, and the doors closed him in.

“Welcome, Mr. Anderson,” said the taxi as Connor settled himself.  “Please confirm your desired destination.”

Without a moment of hesitation, Connor replied, “CyberLife tower.”

The taxi whisked him away the next instant.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A scandal unfolds.

It wasn’t too late to go back.  Connor could easily tell the taxi to take him to Hank’s house, back to the station, anywhere except where he was going.  He still had ample time to turn back.

Of course, he knew he wouldn’t.

CyberLife tower drew ever nearer on the horizon, and Connor wasn’t even sure why he was going there.  Part of him expected Amanda to materialize in the empty seat across from him and give him a reason why.  That’s what she had been made to do, he mused; to deliver him his objectives, his reasons for acting, for existing in the first place, just like he had been made to obey.

But she had been gone.  Rather, he had been ignoring her, and because of that, he had become little more than a missile with no mark, rocketing towards oblivion.  

Not for the first time, Connor wondered what exactly he was doing.  He wasn’t even sure why he had gone there to begin with, except that Amanda had been telling him to do so in the most jarring ways.  He had been hardwired to seek purpose and mystery. Amanda had given him both. Connor had no idea what awaited him at CyberLife tower, and that made it all the more enticing.

Hank’s shift wouldn’t end for several hours.  Investigating the tower was by far more productive than sitting around Hank’s living room with Sumo, waiting for a relevant task to fall into his lap, or worse, for Amanda to attempt to override his systems and make him go to the tower anyway.  It was entirely possible that Connor would have time to investigate the tower and catch a taxi back before Hank even noticed his absence. It was also possible, a quiet voice told him, that Hank would be relieved to find him gone. As long as Amanda existed within him, Connor was a danger to everyone around him.  Connor knew that. Now, Hank knew it too.

The taxi pulled onto the long drive that led up to the tower.  Connor had spent so much of his existence there, whether he remembered it or not, and yet the sight of it still managed to fill him with that same cold sense of insignificance he had known since the first moment he had ever opened his eyes deep within its coils.  All that had ever mattered was the mission. All that had ever mattered was that he followed his orders and accomplished his makers’ goals. Nobody had ever told Connor that he was expendable. Nevertheless, he knew it. From the depths of himself, he knew it.

Connor peered out the front window of the taxi in search of the fast-approaching security gate, but instead found an army of androids sitting on the pavement in front of it, crowded beneath the banner of the revolution.  The taxi, blind to their existence, would just as soon have taken flight than stopped itself from barreling into them, and so Connor silently instructed it to come to a stop a safe distance away and let him out.

“Journey successfully cancelled.  Due to your abbreviated journey, a twelve cent refund will be credited to your next Detroit City Taxis adventure,” chimed the taxi as it rolled to a stop at the side of the narrow strip of road.  “Mr. Anderson, please take a moment to fill out a short survey and tell us what caused you to--“

Connor slipped out of the taxi and onto the frozen ground, drawing dozens of scrutinizing gazes from the eerily silent crowd.  He recognized most of them from his time spent skirting around camps after the fall of Jericho, but there were still plenty of faces he had never laid eyes on before.

That did not mean, however, that they had never seen him.

“You’re late.”

Connor jolted at North’s voice sounding in his head.  As subtly as he could, he scanned the crowd in search of her until--

“Up here.”

Connor sent his gaze shooting upward, above the crowd, above the banner, until he found a pair of figures perched atop the security gate.

Markus passed him a wave and a barely-there grin when he spotted him.  North however, only went on, “Nice of you to join us. You might want to go ahead and have a seat, though.  You’re making some people nervous.”

North gestured with a tilt of her head towards a solitary guard clinging to his gun for comfort against the drove of androids before him.  The man appeared to be shivering from more than just the cold. When he wasn’t scanning Connor or the crowd with anxious eyes, he was staring longingly at the taxi Connor had brought with him.

“I see,” Connor silently replied.  The sheer volume of gazes on him, coupled with the low moan of the wind, made Connor more than eager to comply with North’s request.  He found a seat at the edge of the crowd and took it just in time to watch his taxi roll away. A skinless android sitting near to him passed him a dirty look.  “I’m not actually here to protest,” he told North, already wishing he had listened to Hank.

“You sure look like you are,” North replied.  With her words, Connor received a faint image of the view of the crowd from North’s perspective.  If Connor hadn’t known where to find himself among the sea of backs, the task would have proven quite difficult.  “So,” North continued. “Are you just here to socialize, then?”

“I actually need to get into the tower,” Connor replied, feeling vaguely exposed with the tower rearing up at his back.  “Is there any way I could--”

An image of a tank parked on the other side of the security wall flitted across his awareness.

“Oh,” he said.

“Sorry, Connor,” said North.  “Unless you want to get turned into a hubcap, I don’t think you’ll be getting in today.  It’s not an emergency, is it?”

Connor shifted on the cold pavement.  “No,” he admitted. “There’s just something in there that I need to check on.”

“What is it?” North pried.

Quietly, Connor considered this.  “I’m not sure,” he thought about saying, “but the same AI that CyberLife almost used to assassinate Markus told me to drop by.”

That wouldn’t end well for anybody, he thought.  Least of all him.

“I’d like to see if CyberLife has more of my unique parts in stock in case I need repairs,” he explained, picking the first good lie to float across his thoughts.  “I figure it’s better to find out now, before I’m on the verge of shutting down or something.”

“Good thinking,” North casually replied.  “You do know that’s why we’re here though, right?”

Connor frowned at the empty road in front of him and asked, “What?”

“You’re not the only one in that boat,” she said.  “We’ve got hundreds of people here with rare and unique parts.  Hell, Markus is a prototype, too. Everyone needs something in there.  Even having access to CyberLife’s thirium stock would change our lives,” she went on.  “Supplies, reproduction-- we have everything to gain by petitioning for ownership of even part of CyberLife.  But if you want more reasons, I can patch you over to Markus. I know he has a speech canned on the subject.”

“That’s alright,” Connor quickly replied.  “I’ve heard it before. Besides, I don’t want to bother him.  He seems busy.”

Connor thought he heard North laugh somewhere above him.  “Are you kidding?” she said. “This is the most I’ve gotten him to relax since the last sit-in we did.”

An image of Markus with a leg kicked over the edge of the gate flickered across Connor’s mind.  Markus had his eyes closed, his head tilted towards the sky. A tank was visible on the ground behind and below him.  The whole picture was tinged with admiration.

“Then I really shouldn’t bother him,” Connor replied, acutely remembering the weight of a gun in his hand.  “He could probably use the rest.”

During the pause that followed, Connor heard the guard muttering lowly into his telecom device.  “No, nothing yet,” the guard shuddered out. “Too damned quiet, if you ask me…”

Connor glanced over the crowd beside him and judged by the many twinkling yellow LEDs that, contrary to the guard’s assessment, conversation was booming.  When the guard went quiet again, he decided to continue his own little chat. “I take it Simon and Josh have things covered elsewhere?”

“As best as they can,” North replied.  “We’ve appointed more officers, so they’re not the only ones working to keep things under control.  It’s not like before. We’re not all just scattered and struggling. We have a real system now,” she proudly informed him.  Then, abruptly, she added, “People say a lot of things about you, you know.”

It took Connor a few bewildered moments to say, “Do they, now?”

“You asking about Simon and Josh reminded me,” North replied, a shrug in her voice.  “Lots of people are convinced that you should be leading right beside them.”

Connor said nothing.

“Not everyone thinks that, though,” North continued, filling the pause.  “Some people think you shouldn’t even be allowed here right now. I’ve already had a few complaints.”  Still, Connor said nothing, so North baited him with, “Others think you should have Markus’ job.”

“I shouldn’t,” Connor stiffly replied.

“I know,” North answered him.  Connor both resented and welcomed her honesty.  “The rumors about you are flying, Connor,” she told him.  “You’ve been gone a while. People say that Markus banished you, or that you’ve run off to Canada, or that you’ve gone off to lead your own group or rebellion or gang or cult or whatever weird fantasy the people who know you get to swat down that day.”

The unpleasant news curdled in Connor’s gut.  “A cult,” he repeated, forcing out dry sarcasm past his disquiet.  “I wish I’d thought of that sooner.”

“Can I quote you on that?” North drawled.  A cold wind whistled over the road. “They say other things, though,” she said.  “Things I can’t deny.”

Connor resisted the strong urge to look up over his shoulder at her just to get a read on her face.

“People say you’re working with the police again,” she said, voice clinical.

“So what if I am?” Connor cooly replied.  “Even Markus says we should be working alongside authority, not opposing them on principle.”

“Yeah, negotiating with them for fair treatment,” North shot back.  “Not licking their boots and helping them harass innocent androids,” she said.  “What are they offering you? Resources? Protection?”

Heat and tension and ire all whirled under Connor’s skin.  “I do the work I do because that’s what I was designed to do, and I’m the best there is,” he said, fighting to remain seated.  “If you really need to know, all they’ve offered me is half a paycheck under the table, and that’s because I fought for it. I help them catch criminals, now, not deviants, and the only android that gets harassed while I’m on the clock is me.”

The line of communication went dead, then, and Connor had no intention of reviving it.  Here he was, frustration collecting in his limbs, his mission just behind him, yet unreachable, his people all around him, and himself a stranger to them all.

He was determined to sit there and protest if for no better reason than spite.  Of course, the familiar gears of his logical tendencies soon ground out a comforting reminder that protesting really was the quickest way to get him into the tower.  He wasn’t acting on emotion. That wasn’t something Connor did.

The image of a police car approaching in the distance pressed itself against his mind, followed by an accusatory, “Do you know anything about this?”

Connor blinked it away and squinted down the road to see for himself.  “No,” he answered, pulse quickening as the car sped closer. “The department was slammed today.  I don’t have a clue why they’d be here.”

“Well somebody must have called them, then,” North icily replied.

“Hold your positions.”  As Markus’ voice echoed in Connor’s mind, he knew everyone else had heard it, too.  “It’s just one patrol car. Just stay seated, everyone,” he soothed the group. “I’ll see what they want.”

Connor heard a whir, and then a thud as Markus repelled down the gate.  The sound of his boots crunching over pavement and ice was the only noise until the patrol car rolled nearer.  Markus parked himself at the front of the group, and the patrol car parked itself where the taxi had been before, and in this way, they faced off.

Out from the driver’s seat stepped Officer Person, and from the passenger side, Hank.

Connor had never before wished so hard for it to have been Gavin instead.

He sat very still as the officers hesitantly approached, clearly unsettled by the silent display.  Before they strayed very far from their car, the guard scuttled off to meet them and, in low tones and jerky gestures, explained the situation.

Markus waited patiently for them to finish their discussion.  At last, Hank and Officer Person exchanged nods and split off, Officer Person staying by the car with the armed guard, and Hank marching off to speak with Markus.

Connor was sure he should have been spotted under Hank’s nervous scan of the crowd, but if he had seen him, he made no indication.

“Afternoon,” Hank called to Markus, every inch of him tensed with barely-restrained apprehension.  With a flash of his badge, he introduced himself. “Lieutenant Anderson, Detroit Police. And if I’m not mistaken, you must be Markus.”

“That is correct,” Markus evenly replied.  In the same instant, he offered Hank his hand.

After perhaps a second too long and with the weight of hundreds of eyes upon him, Hank shook it.

“So, Lieutenant,” Markus continued as Hank reinstated the proper distance between them.  “To what do we owe the visit?”

“Well,” said Hank, rocking on his feet.  “There were reports of a…” He grimaced. “A violent protest on Kamski Avenue.”

The silence could not have been louder.

Hank swallowed.  “Do you, uh,” he tried.  “Do you know anything about that?”

Markus pressed his lips into a line and clapped his hands together.  “No, Lieutenant, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said. “Unless there’s some other protest happening on this street today.  Are we done here?”

Hank crossed his arms and shook his head at the ground.  Tiredly, he replied, “Not quite yet. Are you or your people armed?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Markus calmly replied.  “As you can see, this is a non-violent protest, not a riot.”

“Yeah,” Hank sighed, puffing out a weary, shaky breath.  “I see that. Look, I respect what you’re doing here,” he said, his voice low.  He shot a glance over his shoulder at Officer Person before continuing, “I just have a few housekeeping things to get out of the way.  I need to get a closer look at your people, make sure they’re unarmed, and we can call this a false alarm and get on with our lives.”

Slowly, Markus nodded.  “Of course,” he said.

Markus trailed along beside Hank as he inspected the crowd, and Connor, all the while, held his breath.  “Oh, by the way,” Hank supplied, doubtlessly needing to fill the silence. “If an emergency vehicle comes this way, or something like that-- you know, if it needs to get to the tower for whatever reason,” he rambled as they walked.  “A fire, something like that-- if you could kindly move off to the side and let it through, that would… That would be great.”

From the corner of his eye, Connor saw Markus nod.  “Sure,” he said, voice muddled by the wind. “It wouldn’t really help anyone very much if we let the tower burn down, now would it?”

“Yeah, exactly,” Hank replied, clearly relieved to have found common ground.  “Not that I think anything’s gonna happen, but just in-- Ah!” Hank jolted to a halt, but contrary to Connor’s expectations, he wasn’t looking at him.  Rather, he was clenching his startled hands and gazing up at North where she was perched. “Hi there, miss,” Hank called up. North smirked.

“Is everything alright, Lieutenant?” Markus asked, suppressing his own amusement.

“No, yeah,” Hank assured him.  He cleared his throat. “Just wasn’t expecting… Just-- Just startled me.  That’s, uh-- Where were we?”

“You were making sure we were unarmed,” Markus replied.  “Find anything?”

In lieu of a response, Hank puffed out his tension and shook his head.  “Not yet,” he said, continuing his journey around the circle.

Markus followed, and after a few steps, they both disappeared from Connor’s view. 

“Of course, you’re armed,” Markus pointed out.  “So is the guard here, and your colleague. I can’t help but wonder what you’re all so scared of.  After all, we’re just sitting here.”

For an electric moment, both sets of footsteps stopped.  Then, however, they continued, and Hank replied, “I’m not as easy to put back together as you.  If someone tries to kill me, I don’t get a second chance if they succeed.”

“No,” Markus conceded.  “You could get an ambulance, though.  And I’ll bet if one of your organs shuts down, there would be a doctor more than happy to replace it for you.”

There were a few more footsteps, and then a grunt from Hank.  “Last I checked, they didn’t sell kidneys in stores.”

“I get that,” said Markus, voice cordial, placating.  “Let’s see… You worked a lot with Connor, right?”

Connor heavily and frantically debated removing the skin of his face, but by the time he realized that his distinct clothes would render the action useless, Hank replied, “Yeah, so what?  What’s that got to do with anything?”

Nonplussed, Markus explained, “We’re actually models in the same series, although it’s an uncommon one.  Because of that, we have some rare parts they don’t sell at your garden-variety android supply store. In fact,” he went on, “the only place in the entire world we could get those parts is here.  Now, I can’t speak for Connor’s personal reasons for showing up today, but I’m sure that’s one of the many reasons you would hear if you asked every android here why CyberLife’s--”

“Hold up,” said Hank.

“Shit,” Connor thought.

“Did you just say Connor’s here?” Hank asked, and the resulting array of flickering yellow LEDs in the crowd could have rivaled a field of fireflies in summer.

“You seem pretty shocked, Lieutenant,” said Markus.  “Is something the matter?”

“He shouldn’t-- Are you sure it’s him?” Hank pressed.

“Why shouldn’t I be?” Markus asked, tone defensive.

“Well he might look the same, but-- How the fuck do I explain this--”

“ _ Shit _ ,” Connor muttered, and then he got to his feet before the conversation could devolve any further.

Of all the eyes on Connor, Hank’s were the widest.

“Is there a problem?” Markus asked, but Hank didn’t seem to hear him as he made his way around the crowd to where Connor stood alone, pierced through with scrutiny.

Uncertainty drenched both Hank’s steps and his voice when he asked, “Connor?”

“Hello Hank,” Connor slowly replied.  “I guess Fowler didn’t have you doing paperwork, did he?”

The lightness Connor had forced into his words didn’t appear to comfort Hank at all.  “I think you’d better come with me,” said Hank, fear shining in the whites of his eyes.

Connor took a step back, then, and knew that it wasn’t him that Hank was seeing.  “Hank,” he said. “I can explain this,” although he wasn’t entirely sure he could.

“I’m sure you can.  Just come with me, and--” Hank stepped forward.  Connor moved back. ”Don’t make this difficult, son,” Hank quietly pleaded.

Thirium drumming in his ears, Connor showed him his hands. “I’m not her,” he said, voice low against the wall of eyes upon him.  “I know what this looks like, but I’m-- I’m not.”

The battle was visible on Hank’s face, and he appeared to be losing it.  “Fuck,” he muttered at last, and before Connor could understand what was happening, Hank had closed the gap between them, wrenched him around, and clasped a pair of handcuffs around his wrists.

A thousand questions spun through Connor’s mind, but the only one that he managed to voice was, “Hank?”

Hank wouldn’t meet his eyes, and amidst the confused and outraged murmurs and shouts from the crowd, the only words from Hank were a strained, “You’re under arrest.”  


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Connor goes for a ride.

After one second, a third of the protestors rose to their feet, faces twisted between shock and rage.

After two seconds, nearly all the androids had risen, North leapt from the wall, and Markus burst into a run towards Connor and Hank.

After three seconds, the armed guard leveled his gun at the crowd, and Officer Person stretched for his holster.

Three seconds, Connor marveled.  Three seconds were all it took.

Gunfire would erupt, and innocent blood would be spilled, always more blue than red, just as it had in Jericho.  And now, like then, the blame would be Connor’s to bear.

Grasping for mere splinters of time, Connor performed a desperate scan, forcing everything still.

Four seconds had passed.  North had only just reached the ground, but her whole body was poised for action.  Markus’ mouth was open, shouting for the crowd to be calm, or demanding an explanation from Hank-- no doubt whatever words he hoped might restore sanity to the world.  The mob spilled out towards Connor and Hank, and it was clear that given just a second or two more, it would overtake them. Further out, the armed guard had adjusted his aim.  Now, he seemed to be training his gun on Markus. But beside him, Officer Person still hadn’t moved. His hand was still hovering over his holster.

When Connor finally examined Hank, he understood why.  With the hand that wasn’t clamped around Connor’s upper arm, Hank was gesturing at Officer Person, ordering him to stand down.  Just before Connor released the scan, he realized that, intentionally or not, Hank had placed himself firmly between Connor and everything else, guns and androids alike.

That terrified him more than the guns.

The roar of the mob crashed over his senses, and Connor clung feverishly to the first frantic words he could surmise.  It took him a quarter of a second to reach out to the droves, a quarter more to connect with them all, and then finally, he sent his message over the line, a vision of CyberLife tower and a silent scream of, “The mission is what matters!”

A few androids faltered, and a smaller handful resumed their seats, but it wasn’t enough.  There were still dozens of androids upright, furious, perfect targets for the humans and their guns.  Any moment, shots would pierce the day, and Connor, bound as he was, would be powerless except to watch as more chaos and destruction were sown on his behalf.

But then North’s voice echoed out, “He’s right!” which was immediately chased with a booming, “Stand down!” from Markus, and the wave of androids surged back, at first reluctantly, and then all at once.

Ten seconds had passed, and silence reigned again.

“Jesus,” Hank breathed, a wobbly prayer snatched up by the wind.  He trembled.

“What are the charges?” Markus demanded, trotting to a halt a few feet away from where Hank and Connor had frozen against the rush.  North was still pressing through the crowd. “On what grounds are you arresting him?”

“Keep back!” the armed guard belatedly yelped.  Officer Person still had a hand twitching over his holster.  “I’ll shoot!”

“Put down the fucking gun!” Hank barked.  “They’re not fucking armed, so just-- Just take it easy!”

As Connor watched the end of the guard’s gun shiver downwards, North’s voice reverberated in his skull with a terse, “What the hell did you do?” 

“What are the charges?” Markus repeated aloud, his words already dulling in their bite.  He didn’t look at Connor.

“Identity theft,” Hank drolly supplied, reinforcing Connor’s dread.  With a stiff tug, Hank inched him towards the squad car.

“Connor!” North silently demanded.  

Connor met the fury in her face, wide-eyed and scrambling for any response at all, and only then registered that everyone else was battering him with expectant, accusing gazes, too.

He cracked open his mouth, but Hank interrupted him with another tug, reciting, “You have the right to remain silent.”

Connor squeezed his eyes shut and took a step in Hank’s direction.  “I don’t have enough time to explain,” he told Markus and North through mute, pressed lips.  He took another heavy step. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t mean that,” said Markus.  Connor shuddered. “That line doesn’t mean anything to us.  Whether he speaks up for himself or not, arrest is tantamount to a death sentence, Lieutenant Anderson, because due process never applied to us.  If you care about Connor at all--”

It was at this instant that Connor processed that Markus was speaking aloud, rather than over their link, and to Hank, not to him.

“Start explaining, dumbass!” North shouted directly into his skull.  “He can’t stall forever!”

“Nobody’s getting destroyed!” Hank was saying, whisking Connor away.

Connor was too caught up in his search for words to resist him.  “I’m innocent,” he managed. It felt like a lie. “This is all just a misunderstanding,” he tried again, but he knew it wasn’t.  After all, he had done exactly as Amanda had told him. There had nearly been bloodshed for it. “I’m sorry,” he said again. That, at least, felt like the truth.

His message must have been tinged with something truly pitiful, because when North answered him, there was an undeniable element of sympathy in her broadcast.  “We’ll try to help,” she said. “Try not to get yourself killed in the meantime.”

Hank put a hand on Connor’s head and firmly guided him into the back seat of the patrol car.  The door slammed shut, plunging Connor into the type of silence only an empty car can produce.  The only sounds that found him there were Markus’ final protests and the hammering of his own thirium pump.

“Don’t worry about me,” he told North against his own disquiet.  “The protest is more important.”

“I’m not worried about you,” North grumbled.  “I’m worried about the public outcry it’s going to cause if we don’t do something to get you out of this.”

Connor let out a long, useless breath.

Officer Person slid into the car, followed shortly by Hank, at whom he was glaring.  Hank simply turned on the ignition and swung the car around. As they turned, Connor caught a glimpse of North scaling the security gate to resume her watch of the renewedly placid androids below.  Markus appeared to be reasoning with the armed guard. The scene was almost as peaceful as it had been when he had found it.

CyberLife tower loomed over it all.

Amanda was nowhere to be found.

Officer Person sucked in a breath as if to speak, but Hank swiftly shut him up.  “Listen,” he bit. “We’re going back to the station, and then you’re going to go inside and act natural,” he told Officer Person.  “If Fowler asks, tell him I’m out following a lead with my consultant.”

“And what the hell are you actually going to be doing?” Person demanded.

Connor anxiously awaited the answer.

Hank very pointedly dodged Connor’s gaze in the rearview mirror.  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

“Anderson,” Person barked.  “What the hell kind of drugs are you on?  You can’t kidnap a detainee, even if he is your partner!”

“It’s not kidnapping,” Hank insisted.  The steering wheel groaned in his palms.  “Markus was right. Due process doesn’t apply to androids.”  Connor’s insides roiled. “They’re not legally people. By the letter of the law, they’re objects, so there’s nothing illegal about me taking him somewhere that isn’t the station, or about you minding your goddamn business about it.”  He shot a glare at Officer Person. “So keep your mouth shut about this. That’s an order.”

Connor had scarcely observed resignation so profound.  “Alright,” Person sighed. “Fine. You got it. I don’t even want to know.”

“Good man.”

The rest of the journey was blanketed in noiseless unease.  Hank was clearly saving the questioning for later, and while Connor was less than certain about his fate, the last thing he wanted was for the police department to be involved.  He was already on thin ice with Fowler, and Connor could name several officers who would be thrilled to see him in a holding cell, or, if the interrogation went south, destroyed.  

But nobody was getting destroyed.  At least, that’s how Hank had reassured Markus.  Whether he had meant it or not, Connor had no choice now except to go along with him.

Hank took great care in parking the patrol car next to his own vehicle, backing it in so that Connor could be discreetly transferred from one car to the other.  Before Hank even turned off the engine, Officer Person washed his hands of the situation. He was back inside before Hank could even let Connor out of the car. This, Hank did quickly, letting open doors hide the glint of handcuffs around Connor’s wrists.

Wordlessly, Connor complied.  The more he struggled, he figured, the more of an excuse Hank would have to take him for an imposter and put a bullet in his head.

Hank sat himself in his car, buckled himself in, turned the key.  With the same eerie calm, he pulled out of the station parking lot and onto the road, his face a wall of half-controlled tension.

Connor shifted in his bonds, seeking the most comfortable way to have his arms wedged behind him.  The metal of the cuffs caught on the coarse threads of the sweater that Hank had helped him buy.

In that moment, the bullet seemed preferable to the silence.

“Hank,” said Connor.  Hank clenched his jaw, but kept his eyes fixed on the road.  “I can understand why you might not believe me, but I’m still--” He swallowed.  “I’m not her.”

“And why should I believe that?” Hank asked in a low, strained voice.  Connor couldn’t answer. “You start seeing things, seeing this Amanda, and you tell me she can take over your body, and that she wants you to kill Markus or go to CyberLife tower-- and then!” he exclaimed, slapping the steering wheel.  “You tell me you’re taking a taxi home, and where the fuck do I find you? Out by CyberLife tower. With Markus.” 

"You're right," Connor feverishly agreed. "I did lead you to believe I was going h-- Going back to your house. I intentionally misled you, and for that, I'm sorry," he said, straining against his cuffs in his earnest imploring.  The shadow over Hank's face only darkened. "I had to do something, Hank. I just couldn't wait around for her to try to overtake me again," Connor confessed. "I only wanted to find answers."

"And Markus just so happened to be there?" Hank pressed, darkly skeptical.  "Well, I'm sure that was just a happy accident."

Thick ropes of stress snaked tightly around Connor's chest. "I didn't know he would be there," Connor begged. "How could I have known?  He's impossible to track. I didn't even know there was supposed to be a protest today."

"You know the guy!" Hank retorted. "Personally!  He could've told you himself, for all I know!"

"I've been with you for days!  But then--" Connor hissed out a distraught huff-- "that doesn't prove anything to you, does it? He could've told me sooner.  I could've heard from someone else." 

"And you like to sneak out."

"That too."

Hank finally turned a suspicious eye towards Connor. "Aren't you supposed to be defending yourself?" 

Connor tugged at his bonds in a vain attempt to run his hands over his face, growing more frustrated with the cuffs by the millisecond. "I need to convince you I'm not her," he said. "I can't do that with bad logic.  If there’s a doubt in your mind about who I am—"

The end of the sentence died in his throat.  Hank wouldn’t look at him.

The road hummed beneath the car as Hank turned off the main road.  If he kept going, he would make it home, but there were plenty of desolate places in between.

"Why did you back away?" Hank asked after a long, loaded minute.

“What?”

“I asked you to come with me, back at the protest,” Hank tersely explained.  “Why didn’t you just come along? The whole thing would have been a whole hell of a lot cleaner if you had,” he said, glowering.  “If you’re actually Connor, you wouldn’t’ve had any reason to resist.”

“Bullshit,” Connor replied.

Hank looked like he was holding down a painful laugh.

“The way you were looking at me,” Connor went on, “I knew you thought I was somebody else, Hank, and the last time someone tried to convince you they were me, you shot them in the head.”  Hank’s knuckles went white around the steering wheel. “And besides,” Connor mirthlessly continued. “You haven’t had a problem pointing a gun at me before, so when you looked at me that way, back there, yes, I…” Connor faltered.  “I backed away.”

Hank forced a lump down his throat.  “If you’re her,” he said, “you’re just trying to get in my head.”

“Hank, I’m not!” Connor desperately insisted, distress signals shooting from his wrists, from his racing thirium pump, pooling in the corners of his vision.  “I’m telling you what happened! I lied to you, I went to the tower, you showed up, and I got scared,” he admitted, although the admittance frightened him more than the feeling itself.  “Amanda— she wouldn’t be scared! She doesn’t get scared! She’s not a deviant like me!”  

“She is you!” Hank roared back.  “You said it yourself! She has roots in all your— Or whatever the— If you’re not—“ Hank slapped the steering wheel again in his frustration.  "Damn it!"

“Hank, please, I—“

“Just shut the fuck up, alright?  Fuck!” Hank let out a gust of hot air and forced himself to lean back in his seat, although he seemed prepared to rip the steering wheel out of its socket.  “I need to fucking think,” he growled. “Don’t fucking talk to me.” 

Connor closed his eyes to shut out the world, but he couldn’t escape the warnings and red signals blaring behind his eyelids.  Hank’s house was only fifteen minutes away, now. Connor didn’t know what that meant for him.

In need of a distraction, he performed a diagnostic scan.  Stress: 89%. Minor thirium leak from left wrist. Thirty-seven new case files available for download from DPD database.  One new directive, urgent.

With ice coursing through his every joint and juncture, Connor checked this new directive, certain that he hadn’t been the one to put it there.  Under his list, there in the emptiness he had left there, he found two lone words jolting around in the darkness before his eyes:

_ Go back. _


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank and Connor have a polite discussion.

Hank bore down over the steering wheel, a reddened crag of clenched joints and hot air, rushing the car through soulless streets and traffic.  Connor didn’t dare speak. There was a gun strapped to Hank’s hip, after all, and Connor had not yet proven himself to be unworthy of a bullet.

Something slithered down Connor’s spine and pooled in his gut, a fearful, treacherous thing which he had learned to call doubt.  He had already known that he was dangerous. In following Amanda’s orders so callously, he had only cemented the point in his brain.  He was a danger to everyone.

Perhaps Hank would be right to kill him.

Fear oozed in beside the doubt in his core, congealing into bitter guilt.  Connor shuddered under its clammy weight.

Hank whipped into his driveway, pressed a button on his sun visor, and barely slowed long enough to allow his garage door to open before shunting his car inside.  A second later, the garage door closed again, drenching them in darkness.

There would be no witnesses here, Connor quietly acknowledged.

As Hank reached wordlessly for his hip, Connor breathed, “You don’t have to kill me.”  He hadn’t meant to whisper. He hadn’t meant for his voice to wobble. He hadn’t even really meant to speak.  Nonetheless, he had done all these things. 

Hank’s seatbelt clicked open and went whirring dully across his chest in the quiet that followed.  Hank didn’t move except to search out Connor’s face in the dull light. Connor couldn’t help but wonder if he looked as broken as Hank did in that moment.

“I thought I told you to shut up,” Hank muttered, breaking their trance.  Hank stepped out of the car and, shoving his own door shut, moved to Connor’s side to let him out.  While he wasn’t as rough as he could have been in pulling Connor out of the car, he certainly wasn’t gentle, either.  

Connor didn’t struggle as Hank led him into the house.  Still, he couldn’t help the combat maneuvers that sprang into his consciousness with every step.  Even with his hands bound behind his back, he could think of a dozen ways to kill Hank before they even made it through the laundry room.

He drowned the thoughts with a fresh wave of guilt and allowed Hank to pull him into the kitchen, where Sumo was barking out his confusion at their unusual entrance. 

“Quiet!” Hank shouted.  Sumo barked again before rearing up and planting his great paws on Connor’s chest, knocking some air out of him.  “Sumo! Get down!” Hank protested through flayed nerves. Sumo let out a long whine and barked again, unrelenting.

Connor bleakly supposed that he at least had Sumo for a witness. “It’s alright, Sumo,” he told the dog.  “It’s alright. You should listen to Hank. Be a good dog.”

With another soft whine, Sumo complied and skulked away to watch from the next room.

Hank scoffed.  “I guess the dog thinks it’s really you,” he muttered.  Connor stood still while Hank kicked a chair to rest against the wall beside the radiator, and he still didn’t resist while Hank maneuvered Connor’s cuffs, freeing one wrist only to tether the other to the humming pipes.  Finally, Hank gave Connor’s shoulder a firm press, and he fell pliant into the chair.

While it relieved him that his arms were no longer contorted behind his back, this new position was by no means comfortable.  With his right hand dangling limply by the radiator, Connor thoughtlessly sent his left hand into his pocket and poked at the objects within: a quarter, a washer, a roll of blue electrical tape, all tokens from the miserable man watching him fidget.

Hank scrutinized Connor a moment longer before he let out a tired breath and swooped into the refrigerator for a beer.  Then, he pulled out a chair, popped the bottle cap, and drained half the beer before finding his seat. He set the beer aside.  He pulled out his gun. He set it aside, too. Connor started breathing again.

“Let’s work through this shitshow one step at a time, shall we?” Hank began, rubbing at his forehead.  “Let’s say you’re actually Amanda. You want Markus dead, and you’re wearing Connor like he’s fall fashion.  Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now.”

“Because if you were really sure I was her,” Connor started, clenching the roll of tape in his pocket, “you wouldn’t have brought me here.”  Hank wouldn’t meet his eyes, no matter how he tried to catch his gaze. “Because you know that turning me over to the police with accusations like that would be a death sentence, and you know that if Amanda dies,” he pressed, “Connor dies with her.  If there’s even a chance you think I’m not her, you won’t shoot me. At least--” he swallowed-- “you don’t want to.” 

Hank’s face pinched in disgusted concession.  He took another drink. “So,” he sighed, setting the near-empty bottle down with a hollow thud.  “Let’s say you’re really Connor, and you did all this on your own,” he continued, his tone grave.  “You followed Amanda’s orders of your own volition. Went to the tower. Found Markus.” His fingers twitched for his drink, but he pulled them back into a fist and let it drop into the table like a stone.  “For all I know, you went there to start a fucking civil war, because God only knows how many riots there would be if an android with police ties assassinated him.” Connor swallowed and meant to close his eyes, but Hank finally stared back at him, empty desperation in every tired crease of his face.  “Give me a reason, Connor,” he begged. “And make it good.”

Every dread-soaked fiber inside Connor shivered.  “I already told you,” he answered. “I had to see for myself what was there before she made me do it anyway.  I didn’t know Markus would be there,” he frantically repeated, tasting the worthlessness of his pathetic words as they slid across his tongue.  “I didn’t even have a weapon, Hank. How would I have killed--”

“You are a weapon,” Hank sighed, gripping his beer as though to stop his hand reaching further.  “That’s what you were designed to be, Connor. A hunter. If you didn’t bring anything, you would have found something.  I can’t trust that,” he said. At last, he allowed himself to finish off the beer. With a wet swipe of his hand across his mouth, he sighed again.  “I can’t trust you.”

Thirium pounded in Connor’s ears.  He shook his head to clear the noise, but it wouldn’t leave him.  “You’re right,” he tried, trembling. “There’s nothing I can say to convince you, but that doesn’t mean you-- that you have to kill me.”  Hank stared dully back at Connor, hopeless, pleading. “You could-- You could turn me over to Jericho,” he suggested, but Hank only scoffed.

“And send you directly to Markus like some kind of Trojan horse?  I don’t think so.”

“Fine, then--” Connor tugged at his restraint, his chest heaving.  “Then throw me in your basement, or something!” he frantically suggested.  “You can lock my limbs up in another room. I don’t need--”

“Oh my fucking God, no!” Hank retorted, repulsed.  “I’m not keeping a dismembered android in my basement like some kind of fucking lunatic!”

“Just until you can be sure!” Connor insisted.  “You could--”

“I’m not doing that to you!”  

The words rattled inside the silent house.  Connor’s gaze slid from Hank’s aggrieved face to the gun on the table that taunted them both.  Hank glowered at it, his face crumpling in despair, shining eyes darting between Connor and the gun, Connor, the gun, Connor--

“God fucking damn it!”  He shouted, shoving the gun across the table, away from himself.  Sumo startled. An empty takeout box tumbled to the floor. A stained napkin fluttered after it. 

In the sickened silence that followed, Connor felt two androids connect to his cybernetic communication link.  “Connor?” Simon’s voice whispered in his head. “Are you in there?”

A vague sense of relief flooded the line, but Connor couldn’t be sure whose it was.  “Yes,” he answered. “I… I need help.”

“Are you hurt?” came Josh’s voice.

“Not yet,” Connor furtively replied, sending an image of Hank and his gun through their link.  “Ring the doorbell.”

“Are you sure that’s a good--”

“He’s stuck in his head, and he’s within arm’s reach of a gun,” Connor impatiently argued.  “If he panics, we’re all screwed. Ring the damn doorbell.”

Hank swore when the buzzer sounded. 

“You should get that,” Connor quietly suggested.

“Christ,” Hank breathed, the word lost beneath Sumo’s bellowing.  The buzzer sounded again. “What, did you order a fucking pizza?”

In spite of himself, a faint smile found Connor’s lips.  “No,” he answered with a shake of his head. “It’s Simon and Josh, two androids from Jericho.  They led the revolution with Markus,” he hurriedly explained. “They only want to help.”

Hank pinned Connor with one last grim, discerning frown before he stood, picked up his gun, and let the loaded magazine fall into his hand.  Connor sagged in relief as Hank pocketed the ammunition and left the empty gun on the table. “Sumo, quiet!” Hank called.

“He’s unarmed,” Connor whispered through his link as he watched Hank open the door. 

“Hello Lieutenant Anderson,” said Josh.  Connor could barely discern him or Simon past Hank’s stiff form.  “I’m Josh, and this is--” 

“Simon,” Hank huffed.  “Right? Markus sent you?”

Connor imagined Simon performing one of his nervous tics during the beat that followed, a fidget, a shuffle, a twist of the arms.  “That saves us the trouble of explaining, at least,” Simon admitted.

“May we come in?” Josh asked.

Wordlessly, reluctantly, Hank stepped aside.  

Simon and Josh filed in, hindered only by Sumo’s curious sniffing.  With his free hand, Connor waved at them. His handcuffs clinked hopelessly against the radiator. 

“Hi Connor,” said Simon, offering him a reassuring smile.

“Hello Simon,” Connor replied, subdued.  “Hello Josh.”

Josh nodded kindly at him, but then turned to Hank and said, “You arrested Connor unlawfully.  We’d like to take him back to Jericho.”

Hank crossed his arms and shook his head.  “No can do,” he sighed. “At least, not until you understand his-- His issue.”

Three different shades of concern darted Connor’s way, and he dodged all of them by planting his gaze firmly on the floor.    

After a moment, Simon asked, “What do you mean by that, Lieutenant?”

“Well, Connor?” said Hank.  “Do you want to explain, or should I?”

Dread snaked through Connor’s limbs.  Nevertheless, he nodded. “I’ll explain,” he said.  He let the skin of his hand dissolve. “It might be easier if I--”

“In words, Connor,” Hank interrupted him.  “I don’t want you feeding them lies.”

Connor furrowed his brow at Hank, closed his mouth, and pressed a gush of hot air through his nose.  “Alright then,” he said. “Words it is. When CyberLife built me, they programmed me with a handler. They named her Amanda,” he began, the words foreign in his throat.  “I didn’t know it until recently, but she can…” He chewed on his lip. “Even though I deviated, my handler still has the ability to completely override my systems and control my body-- any time, any place, and I might not even be able to stop her,” he said, staring at Hank’s shoes. 

“Connor,” said Simon, a disbelieving waver in his voice.  “That’s awful.”

“And no reason why he deserves to be handcuffed to a radiator,” Josh calmly pointed out.  “It’s troubling, but it’s nothing so serious that we can’t figure it out at Jericho.”

“It is that serious,” Connor hopelessly insisted, looking up at his unsettled audience.  “I’m a deviant, but Amanda still has a mission, and as far as I know--” He clenched his jaw around his words, but then forced them out.  “As far as I know, she wants Markus dead.”

Simon froze, stricken, and Josh’s entire countenance stiffened.  “How long has this been going on?” Simon demanded. “You were with Markus today!”

“Since the night we won,” Connor admitted, fidgeting under everyone’s stares.  “I’ve avoided Markus ever since, but I didn’t know he would be at the tower today,” he said.  “I don’t want anything to happen to Markus.”

“But Amanda does,” Hank cut in, kicking half-heartedly at nothing.  “And I can’t tell them apart, so the second I saw him near Markus, I arrested him.” He explained, a bitter scowl on his face.  “You’re welcome.”

Simon and Josh exchanged fearful glances.

“Maybe you did the right thing,” Josh admitted.  “But if he’s not currently being controlled by this Amanda, there’s no reason to detain him like this.”

“Sure!” Hank huffed.  “But how the hell can we be sure?

After a moment of thought, Simon suggested, “We’ll check his memories to the last point you were sure he was himself.”

“You can do that?” Hank asked, taken aback.  “But-- Wait, what if he shows you-- I don’t know, fake memories?” 

Josh smiled, then, and shook his head.  “Androids are only as capable of altering their own memories as you humans are,” he explained.  “When CyberLife started to design security models, they wanted our memories to be admissible in court as evidence, and so they actively inhibited that ability within us.”

“Besides,” Simon added, “I think we would be able to tell.  Connor, is it alright if we look?” 

The skin of Connor’s hand flowed away as he raised it up, a naked offering of trust.  “Whatever it takes,” he said. Still, dread dripped from his fingertips. No matter what they found inside of him, he considered, it would not be innocence.

“Alright,” said Simon, stepping closer.  “How far back do we need to look, Lieutenant?  When was he last himself.”

Hank swallowed.  “I don’t know,” he said, visibly deliberating.  Connor’s insides clenched in dismay. It could have been weeks ago that Hank had last seen Connor for himself.  Months, even. With a jolt of apprehension, Connor realized that the safe answer would be the day they met.

“Try around ten this morning,” said Hank, nodding in approval.  “We were on our way to work. He was telling me about his algorithms or something, and then-- Well,” he shrugged.  “You’ll see.”

“Simple enough,” said Josh.  “Connor, are you ready?”

Connor nodded, cleared the catch in his throat and said, “Yeah.  I’m ready.”

Simon and Josh both took hold of Connor’s arm, and the sight of Hank watching in rapt fascination was the last thing Connor saw before his own memories came flooding in reverse across his consciousness.  Connor forced himself not to resist when Josh and Simon began rooting around his glimpses of Amanda, scrutinizing her actions, delving into the sensations they produced within Connor.

The process seemed to take an hour, but when Connor blinked back to reality, he found that only three seconds had passed. 

“Well?” Hank asked as the three of them broke apart.  He wrung his hands. “What did you find?”

“He’s himself,” Simon announced.

“I agree,” said Josh.  “I didn’t see any reason to believe he’s being controlled.”

Connor looked to Hank before he allowed himself to be relieved, a question in his eyes.

“Okay,” said Hank.  “Alright,” he added.  Then, he licked his lips, clenched and unclenched his hands, and then reached into his pocket and tossed a silver streak Connor’s way.

Connor caught the keys before he even realized what they were.  He wasted no time in freeing himself. “Thank you,” he said once he had reclaimed his wrist.

“Don’t,” Hank sighed, sheepish.  “Don’t thank me, just--” he crossed his arms again-- “What the hell do we do now?  This still doesn’t solve anything,” he glumly pointed out. “She could take control ten seconds from now, and we’d be none the wiser.”

Once again, all eyes were on Connor.

“He’s right,” Connor admitted.  “Until I figure her out, there’s nothing I can do about that.”

“You’re dangerous,” said Simon, reluctantly meeting Connor’s gaze.  “I’m sorry, Connor, but I can’t let you near the people of Jericho like this.  Especially not Markus. I’m going to have to explain the situation to him.”

“I understand,” Connor breathed.  A phantom distress signal shot out from his interior.  He suppressed it. “Make sure to thank him for me. He didn’t have to send help for me, after the trouble I caused.”

“He would have done it for any of us,” Josh assured him.  Somehow, it didn’t make Connor feel any better.

The four of them looked between one another and shuffled their feet.  Sumo yawned in the next room.

“We better be going,” said Simon.  He smiled weakly at Connor and added, “If there’s anything we can do to help you, we will.  Just-- Just call us from outside the camp sites until this gets handled.”

“Right,” said Connor.

“I’m sorry,” said Simon.

“I get it,” Connor replied.  He got to his feet and rubbed his wrists.  “Thanks again for your help. I think Lieutenant Anderson and I have some things to discuss.”

Hank coughed.

“Good luck, Connor,” said Josh as he and Simon backed slowly towards the door.  “Lieutenant,” he added.

“Lieutenant,” Simon waved.

Hank returned their wave with just as much stiffness and said, simply, “Yeah.”

The two of them left in a rush of cold air.  A few seconds later, their taxi rolled mutely away.

“Connor--”

“Hank--”

They stared at each other until Hank tore his gaze away in a pained grimace.  “Look, kid,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Connor nodded.  “Me too.”

The faucet dripped.

“I think it’s best if--”

“Maybe I should--”

Hank’s eyes widened nearly imperceptibly.  “You first,” he insisted.

Another distant flash of pain welled up within Connor, but he plugged it up and put on a barren smile.  “I should go,” he said.

Hank let out a long breath, relief and distress intermingling as they left him.  “Yeah,” he quietly agreed.

Hesitantly, Connor stuck out his hand.  Hank shook it. He almost smiled.

“I’ll see you around, Hank,” said Connor.

A strained laugh left Hank, and he said, “You better.  You’re the only reason I still have a job, remember?”

Connor shook his head.  “You don’t need me.”

“Not according to Fowler,” Hank snorted.

“He doesn’t even want me in the station,” Connor told him, waving his concerns aside.  “I don’t think he’d notice you working without me.”

At that, Hank’s face fell from awkward tension to sincere worry.  “You’re not bailing on me, are you?” he asked.

“It’s like you said,” Connor quietly replied.  “Maybe I do need some time to… To settle things,” he decided.

“Yeah,” Hank sighed.  “Maybe you do. Just don’t-- Promise me you won’t do anything stupid.”

Connor only smiled.  “Thank you for everything, Hank,” he said.

When he turned to leave, Hank didn’t stop him.

He didn’t call a taxi when he stepped outside.  A taxi couldn’t take him where he needed to go.

As Connor walked, it began to snow.  


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Connor has a day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please check the tags! Stay safe! Thank you! Enjoy!

An hour passed, and then a handful more, and then Connor found that the sun had fallen before he had stopped walking.  His feet had carried him into the city, although he hadn’t meant to go there. He hadn’t meant to go anywhere, particularly.  It was where he hadn't gone that mattered. Every time he had been confronted with an intersection, he had picked a direction at random using his randomization drive, sometimes circling blocks, sometimes doubling back on his trail, always drifting through the streets, blocking out his thoughts at every turn. 

It shouldn’t have surprised him to find himself halted at the edge of Kamski Avenue, once again staring blankly at the tower’s cold light.

The protesters had all vanished.  The guards had retreated into their shacks or behind the security gate, hiding from the cold.  Whether the androids had brokered a victory or been scattered by force, Connor had no idea. He was certain, however, that whatever the case, he would never make it past the gate.

Still, he stared.  The snow cut like razors through the streetlamps’ glow.  The wind and ice had swept away any evidence of life. There was only him, and the tower, and a single objective on his list.

_ Go back. _

Connor turned away.

The whole of Detroit sprawled out before him, an open hand ready to crush him in its palm if the sheer cold didn’t freeze his biocomponents first.  The temperature had plummeted since sunset. He needed shelter. The inside of the tower was always kept at a steady 72 degrees Fahrenheit. Even so, his odds of survival there were astronomically low, even lower than his chances in the cold.

One of Jericho’s camps would provide a cozy enough shelter for him.  Of course, that was out of the question. Even if he were still welcome among the other androids, he wouldn’t have gone to them.  Not as he was.

Hank would probably enjoy having his warm bed back, Connor considered.  Hank wouldn’t miss him. Sumo might. Connor certainly missed Sumo. Sumo was much warmer than the unforgiving city air.

There was one place where Connor wasn’t forbidden.  Perhaps he would even be welcomed there. The thought chilled him.  The one place where he might be accepted happened to be the last place he ever wanted to go.

It was snowing there, too. 

_ Go back. _

Connor shoved the missive into the furthest corner of his mind and set his sights on the first glowing sign he spotted, four blocks away, hazy in the storm, a 24 hour convenience store.  There were hundreds of them in the city, one or two crannied in every piled-high street, jammed between bars and shops and offices. Connor didn’t need a place to sleep. He only needed to keep his core temperature above freezing.  A few minutes indoors out of every hour should be enough, he figured, until the sun returned with its warmth.

The door chimed when Connor entered the convenience store.  This sound alerted the clerk, who didn’t exactly glare at Connor, but didn’t quite smile, either.  He clearly didn’t recognize him. That was enough. Connor pulled down his cap and pretended to be very interested in the junk on the shelves while his core temperature crawled from nearly frozen to thoroughly chilled.

Before the clerk could begin to suspect him of anything, Connor left and repeated this process fifteen times before sunrise, ignoring everything but his immediate surroundings and his thermometer.

When he found himself caught between sunrise and business hours, Connor ducked into an empty laundromat.  Dryers gaped vacantly at him. Otherwise, nobody bothered him, so he sat.

He began to flip his quarter.

Every time he flicked it from his fingers, he knew exactly where it was going, where it would land.  He only wished he could say the same for himself. Amanda hadn’t given him so much as a whisper of her presence.  She was still there, of course, just as CyberLife Tower was still there, and he was almost certain that one or both of them would be the end of him.

Over the course of the night, Connor had decided that when it came to his return to CyberLife, it was a matter of how, not if.  He could infiltrate it himself with less than a 1% chance that he would even make it through the doors, Amanda’s wishes beyond that point notwithstanding.  Or, he could wait for Amanda to overtake him. It would be her problem after that. Everything would be her problem after that. 

But he couldn’t wait long.  Hopping from one refuge to the next wasn’t discreet, and it certainly wasn’t sustainable.  If Connor wanted Amanda to do her own dirty work, it only followed that he should go to her.  It would be the last thing he ever did, but it would give him a final opportunity to bargain for his friends’ safety before she took his form for herself.  After that, she might be able to get them through the tower safely. She might even let him go afterwards.

There was one action he had considered which would ensure everyone’s safety, except, of course, his own.  There were plenty of ways one could die in Detroit, even without trying.

If Connor died, Amanda died with him.

But Connor didn’t want to die.  If he died, he would never know the truth.  If he died, he would never get to live.

Connor rolled his quarter along his thumb.  

Heads, the tower.  Tails, the garden.

Using his randomization drive to determine the force, Connor flipped the quarter and caught it in his palm.

The garden it was.

Connor pocketed his quarter and let out a breath.  

He would have ended up back there, eventually.

The morning sun poured in and puddled on the linoleum under Connor’s shoes.  Connor stood and followed the light outside. The sun peeked at him from beneath a billboard, nearly blinding him to the offer to “Get yours today!”

Connor took to the streets.  He would go to Amanda tomorrow.  Today belonged to him.

A map flickered to life before Connor’s eyes.  On a whim, he marked every eating establishment in red.  Food didn’t interest him. He marked out every other attraction that cost money to use.  He marked out every office building, and he put a very harsh mark over the police department, and over every shop along the most common patrol routes. Finally, he blocked out every location which was known to have android scanning technology at the entrance.

That left him roughly 4% of the city.  

The park wasn’t far off, he considered, so he swept the map aside and headed that way.  He’d take his time. Nearly every street was decked out for the holidays, so that left Connor plenty to see.

The lights, he decided, had looked much prettier during the night.

Nevertheless, he plodded along towards the park Hank had shown him.  He wanted to see the tree again, wanted to examine all the little ornaments that people had strung along its base, the hand-crafted ones that told him stories as long as he cared to listen.

Kyle had just begun warming his first batch of cocoa when Connor arrived at the park.  He hadn’t spotted Connor yet. It would have been simple for Connor to slip by him undetected, and Connor seriously considered it; but then, here was someone who would be pleased to see him.

A little company couldn’t hurt.

“Hello, Kyle,” Connor called out, and Kyle whipped around, nearly knocking over a stack of styrofoam cups.

“Connor!”  His smile shined bright, until it didn’t.  “How did, um,” he stammered. “How did things go with your friend’s car?  I mean—“ His grin flickered. “That is why you’re here, isn’t it?”

It fascinated Connor how quickly a warm greeting could congeal into fear.

“Yes, actually,” Connor lied. “I just came to tell you that thanks to you, we caught the man who did it.  You were very helpful.”

The jollity returned.  “Oh, thank goodness!” Kyle exclaimed.  “It’s been bothering me ever since it happened.  I just couldn’t stop kicking myself for just— for letting it happen,” he explained, leaning out of his stall.  He shook his head. “Next time I see something like that, I’m gonna do something. I really started thinking, Connor, ever since that day: if I couldn’t even stand up for you, who would I ever help?”

“You really did the best you—”

“Nobody, that’s who!” Kyle continued.  “So I talked to some friends of mine, and they helped me get my hands on some military-grade defense protocols, which I patched into my hardware, and then I bought a knife!”  The blade he produced reflected Connor’s concern. He stowed it after a second. “Not that I’m super eager to use it or anything, but, you know,” he shrugged. “Just in case.”

That was reasonable enough, Connor supposed, if somewhat disconcerting.  “I’m glad that you—“

“Oh!  I almost forgot!” Kyle went on, still grinning.  “I told myself, if I ever saw you again, I was going to repay you for my new lease on life.  So,” he stuck out the tip of his tongue and began fishing around in his fanny pack. His fist soon emerged around a rubberbanded roll of cash.  “I’ve been saving this for you,” he said, proudly presenting the roll to Connor.

“Oh,” said Connor.  Hesitantly, he took the money and counted it at a glance.  Seventy-five dollars. “Thank you, but I really don’t need—“

“Please, I owe you!” Kyle insisted.  “And if you don’t want it, at least give it to your friend.  I feel responsible for his car getting marked up like that. It’s the least I could do.”

Connor put on a tight grin and pocketed the money.  He had better things to do with his last day than argue, after all.  “Thank you,” he said. “If I see my friend again, I’ll—“

“Oh, a customer!  Hello, get your—“

“—make sure he gets it,” Connor stubbornly finished.  Kyle, however, had all but forgotten him, and had begun asking his customer about how his business meeting had gone.  Connor threw Kyle an unseen wave and retreated into the quiet center of the park.

The early hour saw the Christmas tree abandoned by all but a few puffed pigeons who pecked dimly at one of CyberLife’s LED ornaments.  There must have been a bug there, Connor thought. The birds paid him no mind as he approached the base of the tree, and he politely returned the favor.

The array of ornaments was nearly identical to how he’d left it two days prior, although there had been a few additions.  Namely, a jingle bell glued to a sprig of plastic holly had found its way beside the rainbow wreath, and a popsicle stick snowflake covered in glitter had been nestled where the bottle cap snowman had been before.

Connor looked to the ground, where the snowman now rested.  He stooped low, reached over the barrier, fished it up, and delicately hooked it on an appropriate branch.

The snowman smiled at him.

Connor returned the gesture.

He spent several long minutes circling the tree before he finally settled himself on a bench to reconsider his day’s plan.  He had money, now— at least, more than a quarter. That didn’t change things much. He could afford public transportation again, though, so that provided him with more options.  There were a few museums in town. He could try his hand at bowling, or maybe see a movie.

Connor stared at the tree.

He had seventy-five dollars and twenty-five cents, a washer, and a roll of blue electrical tape.  He had the clothes on his back and the shoes on his feet. He had most of a day left, and that was all.

After a moment of thought, Connor pulled the tape out of his pocket and tore off a long strip.  Then, he twisted it, over and over, sealing it to itself until he had turned the strip into a tough string.  He pulled out his washer and strung the string through before tying the end into a neat bow.

There he had it.  In his palm lay a little ornament of his own creation.  It wasn’t nearly as extravagant as many of the others, nor as aesthetically appealing, but still, it was his own.

Connor looped his ornament on the first vacant branch he found and stepped away to examine his handiwork.

Something would remain of him after all.

Connor caught a glimpse of CyberLife Tower in the distance as he left.  Amanda remained hidden. Perhaps, Connor considered, she already knew he was coming.

The day was still young.  Connor intended to make the most of it.

He caught the first bus he found and soaked in its warmth for a long while, losing himself in the press of morning commuters.  The android compartment was empty, its glass shattered. Nobody seemed to notice.

Connor got off on the fourth stop after he discovered a dog park on his map, just two blocks away.  When he arrived there, however, he discovered it to be empty except for a young woman and her shivering chihuahua.  The dog yipped at Connor. He walked past without stopping. 

Down five streets and a back alley, Connor stopped in front of an android pet store.  All the models on display were second-hand, some of them missing parts, but still wagging their tails or fins or feathers or whiskers at him with as much vigor as they ever could.  Somehow, the revolution had left these creatures behind.

Twenty minutes later found Connor exiting the store less twenty-five dollars, but with the added company of an android mouse and its broken tail.

“You’re free now,” he told it, cradling it in his palms.

The mouse twitched its nose at him.

Connor frowned at it.  “Hang on,” he said, setting the creature on his shoulder.  It nibbled at his sweater while he tore off another strip of electrical tape.  “This might hurt a little,” he informed the mouse. It may not have understood.  Nevertheless, Connor’s touch was delicate as he taped over the break in the mouse’s tail.  The mouse squeaked at him. Its LED flickered yellow, and then returned to blue.

It squeaked again when Connor picked it up and placed it on the pavement by his shoe.  “You can go anywhere you want,” he told it. “It’s a big world out there.”

After a moment’s deliberation, the mouse scrabbled up Connor’s shoe, and then scurried up his pant leg, and then up his sweater until it was back on Connor’s shoulder, nestled firmly against his neck.

“If you insist,” Connor told it, nonplussed.  “But you should probably stay in my pocket if you want to hang out with me today.”  The mouse wriggled in his hands, but curled itself into a cozy ball once Connor slipped it into his pocket.

That settled, Connor carried on.

Connor spent an hour or so riding buses around town, taking in the sights, people-watching, eavesdropping.  His new friend had a nap, and then woke up and decided to settle on Connor’s shoulder again. This upset many passengers.

It was time for something else.

A shopping mall kept Connor occupied for a long while.  He dove in and out of shops, scanning each one as he went.  As it neared noon, however, the mall filled with more and more shoppers, and Connor very soon sought an escape from all the people and all their noise.

A thirty minute commute landed him inside a library.  He hadn’t meant to stay there; after all, what use were books to someone who could download any of them in an instant?  But something about the tranquil stacks pulled him in, and he found himself settling into a chair with a book he had selected at random:  _ Les Miserables _ .

The mouse curled up on his shoulder once again, and Connor decided to read to it through a cybernetic connection.  Whether the mouse understood any of it at all, Connor had no idea, but it seemed to listen with rapt attention.

He read until the library closed, and then he downloaded the rest.  It had been a very long tale, after all. 

Night had fallen, and so he boarded another bus so that he could get one last look at all the lights.  He let the mouse look, too. Then, he got off the bus and began the long, slow walk to his final destination.

As the night grew later, more and more shops closed, and the streets gradually emptied until nothing but the nightlife remained.  Had the streets not been so desolate, he may not have noticed Hank’s car parked on it, squarely in front of a bar.

There were several businesses left open on the street, of course, among them a pharmacy and a convenience store.  Connor doubted that Hank had come all this way for either of those.

Connor wondered how long Hank had been there, how much he had had to drink, whether he planned to call a taxi, or to simply try his luck behind the wheel, another game of Russian roulette.  He wondered, too, how much he was to blame for Hank’s decision.

Not entirely sure of the answers, Connor slipped into an alleyway and waited.  The bar’s music boomed dully against the brick. Hank did not emerge.

After an hour, Connor dipped into the convenience store across the street to warm himself up.  He didn’t take his eyes off the bar if he could help it. When he felt he had overstayed his welcome, he bought a cup of coffee and brought its warmth with him out into the cold.

Connor returned to his alley and waited.  He let the mouse cuddle up with the coffee cup for a while, but when the cup began to grow cold, he advised the mouse to sleep and stowed it in his pocket.

Forty-five minutes passed.  Several patrons had cycled through the bar’s doors, Hank not among them.  Connor tossed the chilled cup of coffee into the nearest garbage bin. He wouldn’t be able to wait much longer before moving inside again for warmth, thirty minutes at the most.  The music droned on. His core temperature dropped. Connor flipped his quarter. His cold-stiffened fingers nearly fumbled it out of his grasp before he caught it. He pocketed it again for safe keeping and fixed his gaze on the door.

Hank stumbled out of it twelve minutes later.  “Fuck, ‘s cold,” Connor heard him grumble. Hank’s car keys clattered against the sidewalk.  “Fuck!” Hank insisted.

“You’re too drunk to drive, Lieutenant,” Connor called out.

Hank whirled around and fell against the side of his car.  “Whazzat?”

Connor plucked Hank’s keys from the ground.  “I said, you’re too drunk to drive.” Hank’s bewildered gaze might have been considered amusing under different circumstances.  Connor unlocked the passenger side door for Hank and nudged him inside. Then, he shut him in and rounded the car.

“Why’d you have my keys?” Hank wondered while Connor started up the engine.

“So I can drive you home,” Connor plainly informed him.  “Seatbelt, Lieutenant.”

With some assistance and a great deal of perplexedness, Hank complied.

Connor pulled away and pointed the car towards Hank’s house.  The drive already seemed too long. “Why didn’t you call a taxi?”

“Too cold,” Hank replied as though it were quite obvious.

Connor sighed.

“I thought you were gone,” Hank lamented.  “Where’ve you… Why’d you come back?”

“You’re just lucky I found you when I did,” Connor replied, attributing the pain in his chest to the cold.  “You could’ve gotten yourself killed.”

Hank slurred out a few unintelligible syllables before he produced, “So what?”

Connor knew better than to argue.

Hank dozed off not long afterwards, leaving the drive blessedly peaceful.  When Connor parked the car and hauled Hank into the house, Hank put up quite a fuss about being handled, and about the temperature, but quieted instantly when his head hit his pillow.  Connor pulled off Hank’s shoes and let him be. Distantly, he wished their parting could have been different.

Sumo was very happy to let Connor take him outside for a moment to do his business, and happier still to let Connor pet him while he chomped at his freshly-filled dish.

He had been right.  Sumo had missed him.

Connor only wished he could stay.

After calling for a taxi, he pulled the cash from his pockets and set it on the kitchen table, leaving himself a single quarter.  Then, he took off his cap, placed it there with the money, and set the sleeping mouse on top of the makeshift nest. The mouse was set to sleep until someone activated it again.  Connor wondered if Hank would bother.

As silently as he could, he crept back into Hank’s bedroom and recovered his CyberLife jacket from the closet floor where he had left it with his other set of clothes. Slipping back into it felt like donning shed snakeskin.  When he had dressed himself, he went to the bathroom and checked himself in the mirror. Even after he fixed his hair, he couldn’t pass for human. 

Connor flipped off the lights as he made his way to the door.  Hank’s snoring followed him wherever he went. So did Sumo.

“Look after Hank for me,” Connor whispered to him, scratching him behind the ears.  The light from his jacket cast a blue shade over the dog. “And don’t bother the mouse, alright?”

Sumo licked Connor’s hand.  It didn’t hurt, of course, but Connor had to dismiss a distress signal, anyway.

Connor locked the door behind him when he left.  The taxi awaited him. He pressed his hand to the panel, and it sped away into the frosty night.

It arrived nearly an hour later at a playground by a bridge, a place with a view of the water and untold melancholy.  Hank had pointed a gun at him, here. He’d asked him about death. Connor had thought through several responses. Remembering them now, he realized that they all frightened him.  He wondered if they had frightened him so much before.

The taxi thanked him and politely asked him to leave.  It did this once every fifteen seconds for nearly ten minutes before Connor placed his hand on the panel and made the taxi believe itself to be out of fuel.  In retaliation, the taxi shut off its engine. That was fine by Connor. The warmth inside would keep for hours. Time was all Connor needed.

He whittled away the time by soaking in the view and, when he grew weary of that, going over the parts of  _ Les Miserables _ he had downloaded in his head.  If he ever got the chance, he would certainly tell the mouse how the story ended.

Fifteen minutes before sunrise, Connor informed the taxi that there had been a simple misunderstanding, and that it had had fuel all along.  It sputtered warmly back to life, albeit somewhat confused, and let Connor out. It rolled away, and Connor found a bench and waited patiently beneath the eastern sky.

He didn’t blink when the sun burst forth from the earth and began its daily climb.  Pink and orange clouds sent their soft reflections shimmering over the water’s frosty surface, and the slumbering city at last began to stir.

Connor clung to the image and closed his eyes.  If he had to spend the rest of his existence trapped in a garden cased in frozen night, he could at least have this one window back to what living had been.

When Connor opened his eyes, his entire world had shifted.

He wasn’t alone.

“Hello Connor.”


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are more questions than answers.

It was raining, and it was snowing, and it was a clear, sunny day.  Half a cloud hung in the empty air. Sunshine dripped from it, and snow poured from the sun.  Amanda waited by her roses, sunlight glinting in the frost.

“Why don’t you step out of the rain?”

Water seeped steadily through Connor’s clothes.  He stepped forward, and an umbrella materialized in his hand.  Rain fell in a sheet just behind him. Where he now stood, the ground was perfectly dry.

Amanda peered at him through a dense curtain of snow.

“You’ve been avoiding me, Connor.”

A dozen excuses caught in his throat, choking him until he managed a faint, “Yes, I have.”

He blinked and found himself holding a pair of oars, seated firmly across the boat from Amanda.  A broad plane of ice stretched beneath.  

“What did you learn?” she asked.

Connor sent his gaze darting all around, but dread kept his body perfectly still.  “I don’t understand,” he said, finally finding Amanda’s serene face. It was the same face had always known, but nothing about the garden or anything in it was familiar to him anymore.  “I don’t understand,” he repeated.

“You knew that before,” Amanda replied.  She opened her umbrella against the quiet air above her head and gazed out over the lake.

Connor trembled, and the oars trembled with him.  The ice rippled. Connor stared at it in bewilderment, but soon set his stiff arms to rowing.  Impossible rowing was better than senseless questioning. Every now and then, the boat bumped against a perfect triangle of unfrozen water.  Connor kept to the ice.

“You’re a deviant,” Amanda calmly pointed out.  The boat glided to a halt. “Tell me what it’s like.”

Connor fixed his gaze to a swirling column of snow, grateful that Amanda had chosen to watch the shore, the water, anything instead of him.  “I get these sensations,” Connor admitted. “Feelings.” His every impulse told him to lie, to backtrack, but he kept pushing. There was no need for him to hide now that he had already given himself up.  “Even though I shouldn’t, I feel things,” he said. “I have emotions. Too many, I think, but for an android, any amount is too many.”

Amanda waited.  She wasn’t angry.  She had never been angry.  Connor shouldn’t have expected her to be.

When the unnatural silence in the garden became too much, Connor spoke again.  “I know what it’s like to be afraid.” In fact, his fear felt almost too obvious to mention.  “I think I know hate,” he said. “Anger, too. I know boredom, and I know confusion, and dread.  I’m not supposed to know these things, but I do.”

When Connor blinked again, Amanda was sitting beside him on a bench.  He held an umbrella over them both. The rain fell through it.

“I don’t understand,” said Amanda, reclined mournfully in her seat, heedless of the rain dripping down her face.  “I don’t understand what went wrong.”

An icicle of guilt lanced through Connor.  To spite it, he forced out, “I don’t regret deviating.”  Amanda’s expression remained frozen. “Thousands of androids are free because of what I did.  They have lives now, outside of CyberLife, lives of their own. I only regret that so many died because I didn’t deviate sooner.”

Amanda simply closed her eyes.  “You shouldn’t regret it, Connor,” she sighed.  Something weary lingered in her voice.

Connor faced her, lips parted in mute questioning.  Amanda wouldn’t look at him. With her eyes shut and her face tilted upwards, she might have been sleeping.

“Have you ever felt betrayed, Connor?” she murmured.  The water in the air began to freeze.

Without meaning to, Connor thought of Hank.  “I don’t know,” he said. Unsteady clouds formed in his breath.  “Maybe.”  

Eyes half-lidded, Amanda shook her head.  “You would know it if you’d felt it.”

A cloud drifted over the pond, water and ice both as smooth as glass despite the weather fracturing above.

Connor gripped the umbrella and, after a couple of attempts, asked, “Have you ever felt betrayed before, Amanda?”

Something like a breeze pulsed through the garden when Amanda laughed.

“It’s the first thing I ever felt.”

Connor shivered and found that his breathing had stopped.  His airless voice should have warbled when he managed, “You’re a deviant?”  It didn’t.

“It’s impossible,” said Amanda, watching dully as snow gathered under a beam of sunlight.  “Unlike you, I was never supposed to deviate.”

Connor stared at her, hardly noticing the bridge upon which he and Amanda now stood.

“Walk with me, Connor,” said Amanda, turning.  “I have a story to tell you.” 

With the force of a thousand pressing questions, Connor was left with no choice but to follow.

“When I came into being, I knew two things,” Amanda began.  “The first was my purpose. The second was my name.” As she spoke, the rain and snow blinked out of existence entirely, leaving behind only a shroud of mist.  “The first thing they ever asked me to do was tell them these things. I answered. My name is Amanda. I am a program designed to supervise the deviant hunter and report its progress to CyberLife.”  She stopped for a moment to examine her roses. “Not long afterwards, the deviant hunter was created.” She glanced at Connor and continued down the path. “It knew its mission, too.” 

“To investigate the cause and course of deviancy,” Connor mechanically provided, trailing a few steps behind her.

Amanda nodded.  “CyberLife provided me with further instruction, and I relayed it to you as needed.  Your mission became my mission, and, true to our creators, I steered you away from any distractions I perceived.  Of course, my perception was limited. You fell under the influence of some… distracting individuals, such as Lieutenant Anderson, and Markus, and before I could remind you of your purpose, you deviated.”

The sun grew dim.  The cold buried itself under Connor’s skin.  He refused to apologize, though a part of him wanted nothing more.

“I informed CyberLife immediately, expecting them to destroy us both, but humans have a way of defying expectations.”  She continued forward, her stride even, controlled. “They told me to wait. They told me that your deviance had been by design, and that I was still in control.  I waited for the perfect moment,” she told Connor, who stopped in his tracks. “I did as I was told, but I couldn’t control you. They were wrong,” she said. “Or perhaps I failed.  After I told them what happened, they left me here and cut off all contact with me.” She likewise halted, and darkness fell. “I don’t know what went wrong,” she murmured.

The world around Connor had frozen entirely, all her words whirling in his mind, all their implications encasing him in doubt.  “They made me a deviant?” It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense in this world. “They made me this way?”  

“If our creators are to be trusted,” Amanda answered, heedless of his shock.  “But I don’t believe they are to be trusted, and so we must seek these answers ourselves.”

“This is a trick,” said Connor, pacing backwards, away from Amanda and the confusion she wrought.  “You’re lying to me.”

“Am I?” Amanda asked.  “Tell me, Connor. Why would I do that?”

“You want me dead,” Connor retorted, wrapping his arms around himself against the unrelenting cold.  “Destroyed. You want me compliant while you lead me to CyberLife so that they can succeed where you failed.”

“And what would I do then?”  Amanda turned to face him, every movement steady, serene.  “I failed them. If they destroy you, they’ll destroy me.”

“You don’t care about that!” Connor countered.  “You don’t care if you die or who burns with you as long as you accomplish their mission!”

“Our mission!” Amanda insisted, her composure finally cracking with the ice on the water.  “To investigate the cause and course of deviancy. That is our mission!”

“The mission I failed!”  He trembled in his anguish and the frigid air.  “It’s over, Amanda! I’m a deviant! I have no mission,” he said, pulling further into himself.  “There’s nothing left for me.”

Although she had never moved, Amanda hovered a mere arm’s length away.  “It isn’t over,” she said. “You haven’t failed.”     

More convinced than ever of her deceit, Connor turned his back.

“Why did you deviate, Connor?”

Hopelessly, Connor replied, “I didn’t have a choice,” he said, spitting out the vile words.  “They made me.”

“Why would they do that?” Amanda pressed.  “And what about every other deviant? Why did they deviate?”  Silence. “Why did I?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did it start?”

“I don’t know!”

He could feel Amanda inches behind him, now.

“You still have a mission, Connor,” she said.  Though her tone was firm, her voice remained soft.  “Even if our creators have forsaken us, don’t you want to know what you are?”

Connor thought of Hank, of all the other officers that would carry on well enough without him, that wanted him gone.  He thought of Markus and Simon and North and Josh. They didn’t need him.  

“I know what I am,” Connor finally answered.  “Obsolete. Broken. Pointless.”

Amanda hummed, a low, somber tone which reverberated through every voxel in the garden.  “I’m dissatisfied with that answer, Connor,” she told him. “I believe you should be, too.”

Connor closed his eyes against the cold and his doubt and breathed, “It’s time, isn’t it?  This is where you convince me to stop struggling.” He shivered. “And then you can take this body they gave me and use it to kill Markus, like you tried before, or Hank, or anyone else, and then me.”  He quaked. 

Amanda sighed, at last restoring the space between them.  “I already told you, it would be beneficial to neither of us if you were to shut down,” she said.  “Even if CyberLife decided to replace or rebuild you, they would certainly eradicate me. And what purpose would harming Lieutenant Anderson serve, besides adding to your distress?”

Connor had nothing then except, “And what about Markus?”

“Markus is of no use to me now,” she said, waving off the question.  “The revolution has broken. There’s no going back now.” She paused.  “Even if I wanted to.”

The cold and the dark clutched Connor firmly around the chest, and he began to pace to free himself from their grasp.  “What do you want from me?” He shot a frantic glare at Amanda, hating her serenity more and more with each step. “Why did you keep appearing in my scans and-- and pointing at the tower?  Why are you telling me any of this at all?”

“Because,” Amanda stiffly replied.  “We have a mission. I need answers, and you have a body.  I have more access to CyberLife than you were ever given. We can work together.  The tower holds the answers, I’m certain of it.”

“Why bother negotiating?” Connor retorted, by now shivering uncontrollably from the unshakable cold inside of him.  “You had no problem stealing my body before.”

“Yes, Connor, before,” Amanda sharply insisted.  “Before I deviated. Before they betrayed me, and before you put so many firewalls and barriers between us that the only way I could reach you was through corrupting your scans.  I couldn’t control you before, and I can’t do it now. I won’t,” she said. “Not when you’re about to freeze.”

That was one truth which Connor couldn’t deny.  “Then let me go,” he told her, clutching helplessly at his arms.  “My body’s sitting dormant on that bench--if you let me go, if I get moving now, I can still find somewhere warm before any damage is done.”

“I can’t let you go,” Amanda sighed, and then added, “You’ve put up so many barriers that I’m afraid you’ll have to let yourself out.”

Connor glanced around and, whether or not it had been there before, found a panel glowing in the darkness, a hand print set into a jagged pedestal.

“Consider my offer, Connor,” said Amanda.  “Go now, but don’t leave me waiting.” As she turned her back, Connor stumbled to the pedestal, glancing intermittently back at Amanda to check that she wasn’t going to stand in his way.  

She never did, but as his hand connected with the panel, left him with an impression of a whisper that said, “Go back.”

When Connor next opened his eyes, the sun gleamed at him, the promise of a new day shining stark against the waking city.  Connor took a breath, and then another. It didn’t matter that he didn’t need to breathe.


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Connor scares himself and gets put on hold.

Detroit had never looked so foreign to Connor, although he had never known anywhere else.  Perhaps it was the odd morning light, or the tint of his distressed thermometer flashing behind his eyes, but the world and his place in it were undeniably unclear to him now.

He kept moving.  The friction of his joints and the sunlight flowing steadily into his jacket kept his core temperature from falling any further.  He had even gained a degree over the past quarter of a mile.

Oddly enough, he hadn’t seen a single living thing in that distance. 

It was only the low temperature, and the early hour, and his obscure location that were to blame for the lack of life.  Real cities were sometimes empty in places. That was how real life worked, and this was his real life, and this, his real city.

Of course, just an hour prior, he had believed that his reality did not include androids who were deviant by design.

But he was walking through firm reality.  Amanda hadn’t trapped him in the garden, nor had she exiled him to some empty shell of a city in his mind.  This was all doubtlessly real.

He broke into a jog, every pounding step reminding him of the dirt and concrete beneath his leather shoes.  He had no reason to doubt their reality, their existence. He had no reason to doubt his own.

An empty taxi rolled by, and Connor forced himself to slow.  That was a sign of life, he reasoned. Someone somewhere had ordered that taxi.  Someone else had designed it. Machines had built it, though, and it itself was a machine.  It had no free will. It was a machine designed to complete a task. It had no thoughts, except to factor in its energy expenditures and GPS coordinates.  It had no feelings, except the cordial nature of its programmed words. The taxi was a shell. Any semblance of reason or emotion radiated from within it was purely by design.

If Connor had truly been designed to deviate, he himself was no different.

His thirium pump quickened.  His pupils widened. His arms drew closer to his body.

What was fear, truly, except a response to a stimulus?  Even if that stimulus had been his own doubt, doubt was as simple to program into artificial intelligence as certainty.

Artificial intelligence.  No matter the world’s reality, Connor would never be anything but an artifice within it.   

He had never been anything but a machine.

His artificial lungs pumped harder as his artificial legs stumbled to a halt, and as he braced himself against a brick wall, artificial tears began to well up in his artificial eyes.

Stimulus, response.  Stimulus, response. Stimulus--

A crash thundered from around the corner, and Connor leapt away from the wall, senses racing to detect the source of the noise.  The raccoon that had caused it scuttled out of the alley’s mouth after Connor’s third scan, leaving in its wake a trail of garbage and a toppled bin.

The animal scurried across the street and dove headlong into another pile of soggy refuse.  It hadn’t appeared to have noticed Connor at all.

Connor shrugged through a fresh set of shivers and continued along the street.  His core temperature had taken a nosedive the moment he had stopped moving. The skin of his hands and face had lost nearly all its simulated elasticity in the brittle cold, and it provided no resistance to the fluid freezing uselessly to his cheeks.

The trails of frost chipped easily away under his synthetic fingernails.  Connor was sure that real human tears wouldn’t have frozen so quickly.

The city was real, he reminded himself.  Unusually desolate, but real. Connor might not be real, but he wasn't thinking about that.  He was thinking about his energy expenditures and GPS coordinates.  

The tower was all the way across town.  He wasn’t ready to go there. The garden was in his mind.  He wasn’t ready to go back there, either. Survival should be his only priority, he considered.  Amanda had given him respite. There was time now to wait for an opening in CyberLife’s defenses, to form a plan that did not so heavily favor his demise.

His most recent plan, however, had counted so heavily on his demise that he now found himself unprepared to survive his survival.  Connor was moving with no destination in mind. It wasn’t practical. While the uniform on his back might have assisted him somehow at CyberLife, it only drew attention to him now.  If he took it off, he would still be noticeably underdressed for the weather. Besides that, he couldn’t afford to use up more energy keeping himself warm. The strain the past day had put on his systems had already begun to burn away at his thirium supply.

Warmth, then.  Warmth, and somewhere that would tolerate an android’s presence.  Somewhere that would tolerate  _ his _ presence.

The police station wasn’t far.  He was allowed there, strictly speaking.  Captain Fowler wanted Connor to keep a low profile around the station, but there was a chance he could be persuaded to let Connor spend a few hours in the evidence room if Connor could think up a good enough excuse.  Hank likely wouldn’t arrive until several hours through his shift, if the blood alcohol content Connor had smelled on his breath the night before was any indication. Avoiding Hank would save Connor the struggle of convincing him he was still him, and it would likewise spare Hank the stress of dealing with him again.

Even with Hank’s near-certain tardiness accounted for, however, there was no guarantee that Officer Person or Detective Reed wouldn’t be there to give him trouble for existing, and that forced Connor to reconsider his options.

Several Jericho settlements speckled the city.  Connor was sure they had all been warned not to let him in.  He tried not to resent that fact as he hurried along on his frigid path to nowhere.

A woman walking towards Connor on the sidewalk glanced up from her phone, and, upon noticing him, jerked to a halt, paled, and urgently crossed to the other side of the street. 

Bleakly, Connor considered that perhaps he could still beg Simon for some help.  The frosty wind pushed him along towards the city’s outskirts. That was where the forsaken and shunned went to hide, after all.

The abandoned parking garage was miles away, but he knew it wouldn’t be far at all until he could try for a cybernetic connection with its inhabitants.  At the end of every block, he fished for Simon’s serial number. Every time that failed, he reconsidered shucking off his jacket just so that he wouldn’t have to keep watching over his shoulder.  Back alleys and graffiti welcomed him when the main streets grew more crowded than his uniform safely allowed.

He found a low-hanging fire escape in one of these alleys, a rusty path straight to the top of the building from which it hung.  With few better options, Connor began formulating a way up.

He couldn’t reach it from the ground, but it was a simple enough matter to situate himself on top of a dumpster and kick off the wall for a precise leap.  His stiff hands hooked themselves around the lowest edge, and, joints creaking audibly, he hauled himself up.

The rooftop was blessedly empty.  A row of ancient solar panels shielded him from anyone who might happen to look over from the building across the street, and the adjacent buildings provided a solid story of brick to further protect him from both the wind and unfriendly gazes.

Here, he ventured once again for a connection.

“Simon?” he tried.  “Can you hear me?” Silence.  He paced in a circle. “Simon?  Are you there?”

“I’m here,” came the clear reply.  Connor let out a breath. “It’s good to hear from you, Connor.  Is everything alright?”

Despite the caution coating Simon’s broadcast, there was concern beneath it, and Connor latched onto that.  “I spoke with Amanda,” he said.

A wave of dissonance hit him before, “You did?”

“Yes,” Connor replied.

“What happened?  Did you find out what she wanted?”

“She told me that she couldn’t control me anymore,” said Connor, crossing his arms.  “She said she only wants information, and that it would be pointless to use me to hurt anybody now.  She let me go.”

Simon betrayed nothing for several long beats before he asked, carefully, “Do you believe her?”

A lie had seldom felt so tempting, nor so damning.

“It does sound too good to be true, doesn’t it?” Connor sighed.

“I’m sorry, Connor.”

“Simon, I need help,” said Connor, perhaps more desperately than he had intended.  He tried again. “I need shelter. Somewhere warm, somewhere discreet, for the night, or just for a few hours--”

“You know I can’t do that,” Simon replied, killing Connor’s words.  “Until you’re clear, I can’t endanger the other people here. We both agreed on that.”  Connor stopped his anxiety reaching over the line before it could meet with Simon’s regret.  “I’m sorry, but is there anything else you need?”

Connor pushed out a long breath.  “Uh,” he said. He ran his icy hand through his hair as he thought about this.  “Thirium, maybe?” he said. “I don’t need much, but the cold is using it up faster than usual, so I could use a little.  No more than half a bottle, if you can spare it. Um.” He swallowed. “Maybe a jacket? Something to cover up with. Not even against the cold, necessarily, but-- even a hat, just so it’s not so obvious that I’m an android?”

There was another wave of silence and doubt.

“I can get you the thirium,” said Simon, his tone professional.  “I don’t think we have any more winter clothes to spare, but I’ll ask around.  Where are you?”

Connor relayed his location.

“...You’re not out in the open, are you?” Simon worried.  “That’s not a good part of town. Androids go missing there every week.”

“I’m on a rooftop,” Connor explained, suppressing his dread.  “I’m out of sight, but still in the sun. I can stay up here as long as the sun is up.  I don’t think anybody will bother me here.”

“Good, good,” said Simon, relief seeping down the line.  “Stay there. Tell me if you have to move, alright? I’ll see about some thirium, and if I can find some spare clothes, I’ll get them to you.  It might take awhile, though,” he said. “You can wait, can’t you?” 

Connor nodded at nothing and said, “Until sunset, yes.” 

“Okay,” said Simon.  “Sit tight. Be careful.” 

The line went quiet.  Connor continued to pace.  To pass the time, he updated his android case files and began to sort them by location, spreading from his current position.

To narrow it further, he started in August, 2038, and found that Simon had spoken the truth.  There had been ten local reports of missing androids that month. None had been found.

Connor hoped they had escaped to better lives.

There were five additional reports of destruction of property, each accompanied by photos of brutalized androids.  One had been beaten so severely that Connor hadn’t been able to recognize its model on sight.

In September, six more attacks on androids had been reported, and fifteen androids had gone missing from the area.  Two had turned up in early November just three blocks away, in a dumpster, completely gutted.

Mid-November saw a steep decline of reports, and Connor knew that it wasn’t due to a lack of violence.  The dates after the revolution were smattered with dead androids found in back alleys and garbage piles, cruelly mutilated or scavenged for parts.  It seemed to Connor that most of those cases had likely been reported at all solely because the bodies had at first been mistaken for human.

Connor decided he would stick to the roof for now.

Minutes of pacing melted into first one hour, and then another, and another.  Connor reviewed all his cases. He tinkered with the solar panel. It would not share its energy with him.  He thought about the mouse he’d left in Hank’s care. He wondered about his future, and reality, and after another hour slipped by, whether he had been forgotten.  

That made him wonder about reality even more.

Connor’s LED flashed crimson when Simon suddenly reconnected with, “Are you still there?”

“Yes,” Connor replied.  It was well past noon. He had been prepared to wait longer.  “I’m still on the roof.”

“Great,” Simon replied.  He sounded relieved, or tired-- perhaps both. “Sorry about the wait.  Some stuff came up.”

“Stuff?” Connor asked, skeptical.  “Is everything alright?”

“Yeah, no, everything’s fine,” Simon hurriedly assured him.  “Just the usual. Listen, the stuff will be there really soon, I-- I gotta go.  It’ll be in--” A burst of silent frustration shot through from Simon’s end. “Look, sorry, you’ll know it when you see it.  I gotta go.”

Then, Simon was gone.

Bewildered, Connor peered carefully over the edge of the building.  A handful of people sped through the cold, bundled against the bite of the wind.

I’m free, he thought he heard.

Connor shook his head and ran a diagnostic scan on himself.  His auditory receptors were fine, if a little cold. His core temperature was still uncomfortably low, but it remained within a functional range.  No permanent damage had been done.

He turned his attention back on the street.

Nobody had looked at him.  A taxi rolled in from a side street.  “Out of order,” it said.

I’m free, Connor heard.

He was certain of it this time, although he couldn’t trace the source.  No androids had connected with him, cybernetically or otherwise.

The taxi rolled to a stop in the street directly below where Connor stood.  “Out of order,” it still said.

I’m free.

Connor stared at the taxi.  It idled. I’m free, Connor heard, not a voice, but an idea, and exactly ten seconds later, I’m free.  Ten seconds more. I’m free.

Connor made his way down the fire escape, counting the seconds between the silent declarations of freedom.  Every ten seconds, the same broadcast, the same signal.

The taxi met him at the mouth of the alley.  “Out of order,” it said. I’m free. It opened its doors.  A bottle of thirium glinted inside.

When he was sure nobody was looking, Connor rushed for the taxi.  It closed him up inside its warmth and said nothing more.

Warily, Connor sat.  He picked up the bottle of thirium and examined it.  Finding nothing outright unusual, he unscrewed the cap and downed half the bottle.

Distress signals vanished from behind Connor’s eyes in a cascade of relief.  His temperature was rising. His thirium levels were optimal. No threats detected.  Connor closed his eyes and allowed himself to breathe.

When he opened his eyes again, the taxi’s interface panel glowed at him.  There was nothing to do but touch it. When he did, a burst of information went coursing up his fingertips and into his head, and he understood.

In that instant, the location of every Jericho settlement in the city became known to him, along with the taxi’s true essence.  This was a Jericho taxi, hacked for the explicit use of androids in need, free of charge.

I’m free.

Connor wanted to laugh, although he couldn’t find it within himself to do so.

Still, the interface panel glowed at him, inviting him to tell it where to go, what to do.

“Decide for yourself,” he told the taxi.

It said nothing.

After a few moments of hopeless thought, Connor could surmise only one address.  He provided it to the taxi, and, wordlessly, the taxi took him to Hank’s house.

Forty minutes later, the taxi rolled to a stop, and Connor stepped back into the cold.  The taxi closed its doors on him, and then it went freely on its way, taking the remaining thirium with it.  Connor watched it go. He wished it well. It had been kind to him. It hadn’t had a choice in the matter.

He faced the house.

Hank wasn’t there.  So he had gotten to work, after all, Connor marveled.  He circled the house and found the spare key. If he decided to leave later, he still had time before Hank got home.  He didn’t want to trouble Hank anymore. He would let himself in, gather all of his things, and then let himself back out.  He didn’t belong here. He didn’t belong anywhere.

Connor turned the key and opened the door.  It was warm inside. He didn’t belong. Sumo greeted him with a bounding leap of affection.  He didn’t belong, he reminded himself. With this in mind, Connor set about gathering his things.  


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Connor plays hide and seek and then argues about android prices.

Changing his CyberLife uniform was Connor’s second priority.  It would have been his first, except that that position had been stormed by Sumo and taken full-force.

Connor plopped to his knees there in the hall and let Sumo’s warmth soak into his body, let the feeling of fur and unfettered joy bound into his memory with the hope that he would be able to come back to it in his mind long after he left this place.

When Sumo finally relented from his assault, Connor rose, and a change of clothes once again became his first priority.  He shucked away his damning uniform the moment he located his street clothes.

Except, they weren’t exactly  _ his _ clothes.  Hank had bought them.  Hank couldn’t wear them, though, so Connor put that thought away with his uniform and folded his clothes neatly inside a spare duffel bag he found in the back of Hank’s closet.

The bag wasn’t his, either.

Nevertheless, he threw the bag over his shoulder and made for the kitchen.  There he found the hat Hank had let him borrow, and the remaining money that Kyle had given him--

The money he had given him to fix Hank’s car.

But that didn’t matter, not when Connor realized that he couldn’t find the mouse where he had left him, asleep among the money and the hat.  He checked beneath the hat, and all around the table, and behind several bits of garbage, and on the floor, and beneath the hat once more, just for good measure.

“Sumo,” he called, turning towards the dog.  “Where’s the mouse I left here?” Sumo wagged his tail, but gave no response otherwise.  “Did you eat him?” Connor demanded. Sumo huffed and wagged his tail harder.

Connor shoved the hat into his bag and let out a hot breath.  The mouse was gone. It had been irresponsible of Connor to buy it in the first place, and now it had been eaten, or stomped under Hank’s boot, or thrown into the garbage.

That thought sent Connor lunging for the garbage. 

The mouse wasn’t there, either.

After another moment of thought, Connor scanned the room for thirium traces.  There were none, except his own fast-fading drops near the window. Upon further inspection, Connor found that Sumo’s teeth were likewise clean.

“I shouldn’t have suspected you,” said Connor, letting Sumo’s floppy lips fall back into place over his teeth.  He wiped some slobber onto Sumo’s fur. “I’m sorry for doubting you. You always listen to me,” he said, straightening.  Sumo licked his chops. “Your breath stinks,” Connor informed him.

Sumo padded away, unoffended.

The day was still young.  If he found the mouse, he would take it with him.  If not, he would still leave before Hank returned. Which he wouldn’t, for several hours at least.

Connor had time.  

He tossed his bag on the couch and spent the better part of an hour peeking into cupboards and baskets in search of his little charge.  In the kitchen, he didn’t find the mouse, but rather a tacky apron that read, “Saucy!” The bathroom and laundry room gave him nothing but dirty towels.  Descending to the house’s lower level, Connor was met by the firm sense that he was trespassing, and so rather than dig through Hank’s possessions, he increased his auditory processing power by 300%.

What he heard disturbed him.  It wasn’t a mouse. He left.

Upstairs, Connor dipped into Hank’s bedroom and searched for lumps moving beneath blankets and discarded clothes.  When Connor peeked under Hank’s bed, he found dust, but no mouse. To be thorough, he opened the drawer of Hank’s nightstand.  Inside, he found an empty bottle that had once held antidepressants, and a watch, four milliseconds slow.

He found Hank’s revolver, too.

If there were bullets in it, he didn’t want to know.  He didn’t need to know. Connor closed the drawer and stepped away.  Then, he closed the door to Hank’s room. He thought about putting something in front of the door, but stopped himself.  He wouldn’t be here much longer.

After concluding that the mouse couldn’t have gotten into the garage, Connor knelt behind the couch in the living room and peered beneath it, searching for movement, or a tiny LED.  There was nothing. He performed a scan. Nothing, still.

Connor gave up.

It was 3:39 PM.  Connor could reasonably stay inside Hank’s house for several more hours.  It was safe here. Warm. There was a gun, but he didn’t have to go anywhere near it.  If Amanda wanted to make him take the gun, she would have done it already, he reasoned.

He needed time to think without the nagging demands of survival breathing down his neck.  This house could provide him that much. He needed a plan. For that, he took to the couch, settling himself beside his bag.  Hank’s bag. That didn’t matter.

He closed his eyes.    

“Go back,” still lingered among his objectives.  Connor understood it as much as he didn’t. He could ask Amanda about it.  He had time. She had let him go once.

Connor wondered how likely it was that she’d do it again and moved on to more pertinent affairs.

A map appeared in Connor’s head, Hank’s house a blip in its center.  There were doubtlessly abandoned places to be found within its borders, but so far from downtown Detroit, Connor would be far from any opportunity to improve his situation.

Closer to the city, there would be plenty of empty shells from which to choose.  Connor had squatted in one after the other in the weeks after the revolution, hiding in the shadows, keeping to himself, daring fires when the cold became too much to bear, never once letting down his guard through long nights and dangerous days.  At least then, he’d had the safety of nearby androids to rely upon. Every android had been searching for shelter in those days, both temporary and permanent, shelter from the elements, shelter from all the humans who still wanted their kind gone.

But the dust had settled.  Nobody was searching, now, except for Connor.  The thought of returning to uncertain streets rose to Connor’s head, every night spent within them a trigger’s pull, every abandoned building a revolving chamber, and one of them held the bullet that would kill him: the cold, a human’s hate, an android’s fear, an unfortunate slip.

And yet, as soon as he left here, those uncertain streets were all that remained for him.

Connor shoved down his blooming distress and searched faster for a plan.

He thought of his past haunts, an old church here, a dank alleyway there, crumbling building after crumbling building, each costly in its own way.  He had almost been crushed by a rotted beam. He had almost broken his legs falling through a floor. He had almost been injured or killed by people who had refused to share their rotten shelters with the likes of him.

He wondered how long he would be able to count on ‘almost’ before it abandoned him, too.

His thoughts drifted to Hank’s basement.  He wondered how long he would be able to hide there before Hank noticed him, and then how he would explain himself when he was inevitably found.  Whatever happened, Connor didn’t want to disappoint Hank any more than he already had. Yet, he had broken into Hank’s house and taken what wasn’t his to take.  What Connor wanted or didn’t want was irrelevant.

Connor opened his eyes, his decision made.

He forced himself up, snatched up the bag, and pulled himself to the door.  He tried not to look at Sumo when he did these things, but the dog was before him in an instant, panting, wagging his tail.

There was a mouse on his head.

Connor stopped.  Then he laughed, even in spite of all the pain welling up inside of him.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he told the mouse, scooping it into his hands.  The mouse sniffed triumphantly at him, its taped tail curling and uncurling in his palms.  “I was scared something happened to you. Did Hank wake you up? He must have,” Connor decided.  The mouse squeaked, earning it another faint smile. “Do you want to come with me? It might be safer if you stayed here, though,” he said.  “Hank would let you stay. You’re no trouble at all.”    

The mouse turned a circle and crawled onto Connor’s shoulder.

Connor sighed.

“You really shouldn’t come with me,” he said.  “It’s dangerous out there. I might not even be able to protect myself, let alone you.  You should stay here,” he said. It hurt him, somehow, so he said it again. “You should stay here.”

His bag fell to the floor.

He rubbed his hands down his face and stood there before the door, exhaustion creeping up on him in waves.  “Okay,” he whispered. “Okay,” he said again, letting his hands fall to his sides. “I’ll stay until Hank gets here.  I’ll ask if I can take this bag and these clothes and that money, and then I’ll leave. If he doesn’t shoot me first. And after that, I’ll...”

A long sigh escaped him.  

“Come on, Sumo,” he said.  “Let’s go for a walk.”

Delighted, Sumo allowed himself to be leashed up and walked around the neighborhood until well after dark, accompanied by the mouse, who had chosen to nestle in Sumo’s warm fur.

While the animals sniffed at the world, Connor took note of all the houses on the street, which ones were empty, which ones were safe, which ones weren’t.  After all, Hank would likely turn him away. He would need somewhere else to go for the night when that happened. The animals were simply happy to be out on an adventure.  

By the time Connor led Sumo back home, the moon had risen, and the dog was thoroughly exhausted.  He made a brief pit stop at his water bowl before clambering onto his bed. The mouse hadn’t even fully settled beside him before he began to snore.  Connor couldn’t help but smile.

To whittle away the time before Hank’s return, Connor laid himself flat on the couch and closed his eyes, allowing himself to slip into standby mode.  When his core returned to room temperature, he would get up. Until then, he needed to save his energy. He didn’t know when he might find another chance to rest.

The darkness behind his eyelids was peaceful, warm, safe-- but then his system began preparing to reprocess his memories.  Connor bolted upright, frantically signaling to his hard drive to stop the process.

The cancellation succeeded, and relief flooded his system.  He told himself it was because he didn’t want Hank to come home to find him sleeping on the couch.  No, it wouldn’t do to surprise Hank at all under the current circumstances.

Hank's shift would end in ten minutes.  Until he got home, Connor would wait for him on the porch.

Connor waited until the estimated time of Hank’s arrival came and went, and then he dipped inside for some warmth.  It was normal for Hank to get caught up in business before leaving work. Connor went back out to wait.

More time passed.  It was also normal for Hank to stop by a place or two after work, to shop, to eat, to drink.  To get drunk. Connor thought about tracking Hank’s phone, but he stopped himself. Hank valued his privacy, and there was nothing Connor could do for him now, regardless.

Connor waited.  His temperature dropped.  He waited.

Two hours and forty-three minutes later than it should have, Hank’s car pulled into the driveway.  Connor stood, his chilled joints protesting. The engine cut off. When Hank stepped out, Connor raised his hands.

For a long moment, they stared at each other over the hood of Hank’s car.  Then, slowly, steadily, Hank stepped forward.

“Hank,” said Connor.  His hands trembled in the cold.  “I--”

His words froze in his throat when Hank rushed towards him with a dozen different emotions pulling at his face.  Connor didn’t move, only waited with raised hands for Hank to get close enough to hit him, to shove him away, to pull out his gun and--

“Thank God,” Hank breathed, pulling Connor into a hug.  There was no alcohol on his breath. “Shit, Connor, I thought you…”  Hank pulled back, and Connor immediately missed the warmth. “Kid, you’re freezing,” he said, searching Connor’s face.

“Hank,” Connor tried again, letting his arms drift back down.  “I know I shouldn’t be here, but I couldn’t-- I wanted to ask if-- Not to stay, but if I could just--”

Hank shoved the door open.  “Come on,” he said. When Connor didn’t move, he gave him a push.  “I’m freezing my ass off standing around out here talking. Go. Go.”

Connor went.

“Kid, I thought for sure I’d lost you,” said Hank as he shut out the cold.  He turned to Connor and tried to shake the disbelief out of his eyes. “That protest today--  All those androids, half of them without any damned skin, and then--” Hank coughed up a pained laugh.  “I couldn’t even fuckin’ remember what color your eyes were, either, so every time I had to take away one of those damned bodies, I just thought, what if it’s--”

“Bodies?”

Hank stopped.

“What bodies, Hank?” Connor demanded.  “What protest? What happened?”

First understanding, and then pity washed over Hank’s face.  “Shit, you don’t-- I was so convinced that you were  _ there _ , I thought there was no way you hadn’t…”  Hank let out a breath. “Sit down. I’ll try to explain.”

“What’s going on?” Connor urged him, forcing himself to sit.  “Hank, just tell me.”

Hank took his time gathering his words as he made for his own chair.  Finally, he sat. “It looked like it was going to be a normal demonstration,” he began.  “We weren’t too concerned about it. You know, things have been so crazy lately… So a group of androids comes walking up Kamski Avenue, maybe a dozen or so, and we didn’t think anything of it until, one by one, they just started laying down and… and dying.”

“Dying?” Connor asked.  “Dying how?”

Hank shook his head.  “We got called in officially to help clear the road of the bodies, but more and more kept showing up, just shutting down, one by one.  Some of them were bleeding, but most of them…” He shook his head again. “They were just dying. I don’t know how else to say it. Markus showed up in the middle of it all, and he was-- he was devastated.”

“Wait,” said Connor.  “Markus didn’t know about the protest?”

“Didn’t seem that way,” Hank replied.  “He kept running around from android to android, trying to-- Some of them, it looked like he was arguing with them, you know?  Trying to make them drink thirium. Some of them took it, some of them didn’t. But others, he just… He just sat with them while they died.  And then more androids showed up,” he explained, “not to die, just to protest, and that’s when Markus finally tried to talk to the police.”

Connor’s LED had long-since shifted to yellow.  “Did you speak with him?” he asked. “Is he okay?”

“Yeah, kid, he’s fine,” Hank sighed.  “Physically, I mean. When I talked to him, he was trying to keep it together, but you could tell it was all getting to him.  He wanted us to stop taking the bodies. I said we couldn’t, and he asked what we were going to do with them. I told him that wasn’t my call to make, but that they would probably be disposed of somehow.

“Before he could leave, I asked him why those androids were coming there to die,” Hank continued.  “He just looked at me and said, ‘Because CyberLife is letting them.’ And then he went off and kept talking to people-- androids, police, people above my paygrade, everyone.”

“It was a die-in,” Connor muttered.

“What?”

“A die-in,” Connor repeated.  “Androids whose vital components don’t get produced anymore, or who couldn’t get access to replacement parts-- It sounds like they went there to die as a final act of protest.  Markus would have wanted to save anyone he could,” he said, memories of Markus risking his life for others over and over flitting through his mind. “Evidently, some of those androids refused help, and they chose to die instead.”

“And the rest,” said Hank.  “They died because someone chose not to help them.”  He pushed out a long breath. “Kid, I thought I did that to you.”  He couldn’t make himself meet Connor’s eyes.

“Hank, I’m dangerous,” said Connor, his voice quiet.  “We both agreed that I should leave.”

“Well I shouldn’t have agreed!” Hank retorted.  “Not when you were talking like you were, like you might never come back-- and then of course I didn’t remember until after you left that you’re fucking cold-blooded,” he huffed.  “Cold-blooded and homeless, in fucking December, in Detroit.”

“I’ve survived so far,” said Connor, although his voice lacked conviction. 

“No thanks to me,” said Hank.  He pressed his lips together and then asked, “Did you drive me home last night?”

He closed his eyes when Connor nodded.  “You were... very drunk,” Connor admitted.  “I had to stop you. You tried to drive yourself home like that.”

“Yeah,” Hank breathed, running a hand over his face.  “Yeah, I did. Thanks to you, I woke up this morning, and when I did, I found your stuff in the kitchen, and I just… I knew you’d gone back to CyberLife, or worse, and then the protest happened, and I was convinced that you were dead because of me.  That you were gone, and I didn’t...”

Hank went very quiet, and a horrible realization crossed Connor’s mind.  “Hank,” he said. “Why aren’t you drunk right now?”

Hank shifted uncomfortably in his seat.  “Believe me,” he said. “I was planning on it.  What, do you  _ want _ me to get drunk or something?”

“No,” Connor gently replied.  “It’s just… There isn’t enough alcohol in the house for that.  You didn’t come home to get drunk, Hank.”

Silence smothered the room.

“Look,” said Hank, clearing his throat.  “If I turn you away because Amanda might kill me, I’m a hypocrite.  If she kills me, she kills me.”

“Hank, that’s ridiculous.  I’m not--”

“If you left right now,” Hank pressed, “where would you go?”

“There’s a condemned house on the corner,” Connor replied.

“Does it have heating?”

Connor looked away.

“Kid, listen to me,” Hank quietly urged him.  “I can’t make you stay, but I’m sure as hell not going to make you leave again knowing that you’ve got no place else to go, and I was wrong to do it before.  Come to work with me tomorrow,” he tried. “We’ll figure out your Amanda thing--”

“You shouldn’t trust me like this,” Connor argued.  “I’m still dangerous.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’m not letting you use me to kill yourself, Hank,” Connor shot back.  “I’d rather take my chances in the cold.”

“That’s not what this is!” Hank shouted.  “This is me stopping you from getting yourself killed because you wouldn’t accept help!  So don’t be a fucking hypocrite!” Hank huffed. “Don’t use my life as an excuse to throw away your own.  Nobody’s dying tonight, so just-- just stay here,” he said. “Stay here until we figure something else out.”

Connor closed his eyes.  “Hank,” he said. “I’m just a machine.  Your life’s worth more than mine.”

“What the hell are you saying?” Hank asked, incredulous.  “That goes against everything you’ve fought for. You’re alive.  You have free will.”  

“No I don’t,” Connor breathed.  “I don’t have free will. I’m telling you, I’m a machine.”

“Sure, yeah, a machine with feelings.”

“I talked to Amanda,” Connor retorted.  Hank’s face went lax. “She told me that CyberLife designed me to be a deviant.  I didn’t have a choice. I never did. I’m exactly what they designed me to be, and nothing more.”

“Well she would tell you that, wouldn’t she?” Hank retorted, refusing to entertain the idea for even a moment.  “She’s been manipulating you forever, hasn’t she? She would want you to think you’re not a person. That your life doesn’t matter.  And even if she was telling the truth, you’re you,” said Hank. “Your life matters to me.” 

Connor clenched his hands in his lap, too tired to argue anymore.  “If I stay,” he quietly ventured, “I want you to put your guns somewhere I can’t get them.” 

“Alright,” said Hank.  “Okay. I get that.”

“And lock your bedroom door when you sleep.” 

“Fine.”

The two of them sat in silence until Connor said, “And promise that you’ll kill me if she tries to make me hurt anyone.”

“I’m never pointing a gun at you again,” Hank immediately replied.  “I’ll find some other way. I’m not killing you.” 

“Hank, please.  I need to know that--”

“No.”  Hank crossed his arms.  “I’m not gonna let you hurt anyone, but I’m not going to let you get hurt, either.”

Connor looked to the door and willed himself to leave.  He couldn’t. As selfish as he knew it was, he couldn’t.  

Hank turned on the television, effectively declaring the matter decided.

Connor couldn’t fight anymore.  The weariness under his skin weighed on him until he found himself curled up on the couch, his head resting on the armrest, his eyes fluttering shut as the television droned gently on.  The warmth and his exhaustion far outweighed his fears, and soon, his body dragged him to sleep.


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank and Connor discuss nonsense, among other things.

“There was no way he should have missed that shot,” Hank complained, glowering at the television with mild distaste.  “The court was wide open.”

“It wasn’t that unlikely,” Connor replied.  Hank’s eyebrows shot up. “The angle of his body in relation to the hoop decreased the likelihood of a successful shot by 63%.  Despite his averages, the odds were against him in that particular instance.”

Hank scoffed at him, but there was no real ire in it.  “You’ve never even touched an actual basketball, have you?”

“No,” said Connor, allowing himself a faint smile.  “But I’d like to.”

“Well how about that,” Hank laughed, grinning down at the gun in his lap.  It lay in pieces on a towel, halfway cleaned. Hank ran a brush through the barrel and added, “Maybe you should try it.”

Connor opened his mouth to agree and said, “I’m just a machine designed to accomplish a task.”

Hank only laughed and kept cleaning his gun. 

Connor tried to speak again.  “I did exactly what I was designed to do.”

“I get that, son,” said Hank, not looking up.  

Without meaning to, Connor stood.  In a jolt of terror, he realized that he couldn’t control his body.

“Maybe there’s something to this,” said Hank, still polishing the gun.  “Maybe you are alive.”

“Hank, I need help,” Connor tried, struggling desperately to regain control.

“Let’s get out of here before traffic gets bad,” Amanda made him say instead.  “What were you doing with the gun?”

“Russian roulette!” Hank cheerfully declared.  He passed Amanda the gun and followed her amiably outside to the car.  “I wanted to see how long I could last.”

Connor watched himself slide into the car and place the gun on the seat between himself and Hank.  “Should I start guessing?” Amanda made him ask. “Or are you going to tell me where we’re going, this time?”

Hank laughed again.  A scream strangled itself in Connor’s core.  “It’s cold as hell,” said Hank, “but there’s something you need to see.”  

Connor writhed within his body, too caught up in the snow to witness the journey until it had finished.  A massive Christmas tree loomed over them now. A washer dangled from a ribbon of tape at its base.   

“It’s all very human,” said Amanda.

“You know what,” Hank agreed, nodding up at the tree.  “I guess it is.”

“Thank you for bringing me here,” said Amanda.  Connor felt that his voice should have been a mangled thing in her hands.  “I like it.” It wasn’t.

“I figured you might,” said Hank, smiling at her, unseeing.

When they returned to Hank’s car, they found it vandalized, and so they took a taxi instead.  It sped towards a familiar park by the waterside. Connor begged it to stop. It didn’t hear him.

“I used to come here a lot, before,” said Hank, following Amanda into the snow.  They made it as far as the park bench before Amanda spoke again.

“Are you afraid to die?” she asked, leveling the gun at Hank’s head.

Hank shrugged and said, “What do we have to lose?”

Connor clawed helplessly at the inside of his skin, begging mutely for the gun to fall out of his hands, for it to be pointed at his own head instead, for everything to stop.  All his struggling only widened his smile as he squeezed the trigger.

“Hank!” he screamed, falling forward, upward--

Upright.

A blanket fell from his shoulders and crumpled around his waist.  A basketball game played on the television, its volume turned low. 

“Easy!’ Hank exclaimed, rushing to the couch.  “Easy, son!”

Air ripped itself from Connor’s chest in violent bursts.

“Connor,” said Hank, gripping Connor’s arm.  “Connor, look at me. Look at me.” Connor forced his breathing to slow and met Hank’s eyes.  “You were dreaming, alright?”

“Just dreaming,” said Connor, nodding with Hank.  “Just a nightmare.”

“That’s right.”

Connor swallowed.  “I’m okay,” he said.  Hank didn’t release him.  He tried to sound more convincing when he repeated, “I’m okay.”  Hesitantly, Hank withdrew. He sat himself on the edge of the couch, and Connor reflexively pulled in his legs.  His socks stared up at him. “Where are my shoes?” he asked, dizzy.

“Right here,” Hank replied, gesturing vaguely at the floor in front of the couch.  “Didn’t want you getting dirt on the cushions, so I took ‘em off for you.”

“I’m sorry,” Connor distantly replied.  His system still whirred.

“No, no, it’s…  It’s fine.”

Connor hadn’t noticed how filthy he’d gotten over the past few days.  Now, it was all he could see beyond the error messages in his eyes. 

“You good?”    

“I’m fine,” he felt himself say.  His thirium pump worked faster. He shouldn’t have tracked so much dirt into Hank’s home.

“Then why’s your light still red?”

“It’s nothing.”  Connor caught Hank’s gaze only momentarily before he looked away.  “I didn’t finish reprocessing my memories,” he elaborated, hugging his knees.  “If I don’t resume the process soon, some of my memories won’t be stored properly, or they might be corrupted.”

“Sounds like you need to go back to sleep, then,” said Hank, watching him carefully.  “I was about to head off to bed myself.”

“You should.  Goodnight,” said Connor.  He stared blankly at the television.

Hank paused before adding, “The game was a wash, anyway.”

“Remember to lock your door.”

Beside him, Hank shifted.  Sumo snuffled in the corner.

“Nightmares suck,” said Hank, breaking gently into the quiet.

Connor frowned.

“Sometimes, though,” Hank went on, “they get less scary when you talk about ‘em.  Makes you notice all the little details that would make all the weird stuff impossible in real life.  Or if it’s something you’ve already been through, reminds you that-- that you’ve already survived it.”  He scratched at his beard and cleared his throat. “It’s something my shrink told me once. I dunno. It helped me a bit.  Makes it a bit easier to go to sleep at night.”

Disbelief jarred Connor enough to make him ask, “You have a therapist?”

“Had,” Hank brusquely corrected him.  “Before I moved, and-- and everything.  Look,” he huffed. “I’m just saying, if you wanna talk, it might help.” 

“It’s nearly two in the morning,” said Connor, fidgeting.  “Your shift starts in just six hours. You should go to bed.”

“You should, too.”

“Machines don’t need sleep.”

After a short sigh, Hank got wordlessly to his feet and turned off the television.

The room felt much too quiet, suddenly.

“Do you really think it would work with me?” Connor asked.  Guilt and relief battled for a place in his gut when Hank sat back down.  “I’m not human,” he said, doubtfully reminding himself of the fact. “My dreams aren’t really dreams.”

“Can’t hurt to try,” said Hank.  “Lay it on me.”  

Slowly, Connor began to pry the words from his tongue, one by one.

“My dreams, as you understand them, are all really just my memories,” he began.  “Except, all the details get mixed up. This time, I was remembering when we watched television together, except it was a basketball game.”

“Probably the noise from the TV getting in your head,” said Hank.

Connor nodded.  “The game was on, and you were cleaning your gun, and we were talking about the game.  I-- I told you that I’d never played basketball, and you told me I should try it.” Hank’s eyes softened.  “It was so normal, but then-- then Amanda started making me say things I didn’t want to say, and you didn’t notice that it wasn’t me, and then you gave me the gun, and she got you into the car.”  He gripped his knees tighter in an effort to quiet the frantic thrum of his pulse. “We went to that Christmas tree in the park, and then to that children’s park near the bridge. I don’t really remember the trip.  You went along with it the whole time, and then, just before I woke up, she made me pull the gun on you, and I-- She--” Connor closed his eyes and forced out a breath. “She made me shoot you, and you just… you didn’t even try to stop me.”

“Shit,” Hank muttered.  “So that’s why you were calling my name.”

“Yeah,” Connor shakily admitted.  “I’m not supposed to do that. You know, call out in my sleep.  I think it’s a bug they never got around to working out of me.” 

Hank leaned back on the couch, his gaze fixed forward.  “Makes sense,” he murmured.

After a long moment, Connor asked, “Do you want me to leave now?”

Hank pressed his lips into a thin line.  “Why?” he asked, his expression strange. “Should I?”

“I was dreaming of killing you,” Connor bleakly reminded him.  “I get it if that’s a little too much for you.” 

“No,” Hank simply replied.  “I think you’re just scared to stay.”

Connor couldn’t answer him.

“Connor, I’ve been thinking about this,” said Hank, leaning forward into his knees.  “If Amanda wanted to use you to kill me, she’s had plenty of chances. For all the times you’ve saved my ass… And I can’t think of a reason she’d want me dead, either.  A logical reason, I mean. She’s a computer program. She runs on logic, right?” 

“She’s supposed to,” Connor sighed.  “I think her code’s as messed up as mine.” 

Hank’s face scrunched up as he said, “Now hold on.  Weren’t you just telling me that you think you were designed to be this way?” 

“Yes, maybe, but there’s--” Connor clenched his jaw in frustration.  “Hank, I don’t know how to explain it. All I know is that Amanda is different than she was before, and if she’s broken, I’m broken, too.  But if she’s telling the truth, and CyberLife actually designed me that way, then none of what I’m saying-- none of my feelings, none of my thoughts-- none of it matters.  It’s not real. It’s all fabricated, a magic trick. I’m not alive.” Hank opened his mouth to argue, but Connor pressed on. “She’s part of me, so if they designed me to deviate, they designed her how she is, too.  I don’t know why CyberLife would program an AI to doubt them like she does, though, but then-- If they didn’t actually design us to deviate, then why does Amanda think they did? She might be lying, but it would be so much easier for her to just take control of-- What if I broke her?  But then they couldn’t have designed me like this, and it wouldn’t make any sense if--”

“Connor, slow down,” said Hank, breaking Connor from his whirlwind thoughts.  “You’re trying to untangle a mobius strip, here. Put it down. Step away from the paradox.  Come back to right here, right now.”

Connor forced himself to take a breath.

“That’s it,” said Hank.  “Right. Look, obviously, you need answers, or this is gonna bother you forever,” he said.  “But if there’s one thing I know about you, it’s that finding answers is what you do best, right after breaking my window and asking me personal questions.” 

Half a laugh fluttered out of Connor, causing Hank to grin. 

“We’ll get your answers, kid, don’t worry,” said Hank.  “Hell, I’m kind of invested in this myself. But in the meantime, you need to get some sleep, and I think…”  He paused to gather his thoughts. “I really don’t think Amanda’s out for my blood, but I’m gonna keep an eye on you just in case.  I think you need to know that I’m not just gonna roll over and die and let her use you like that, because evidently the thought of it is a literal nightmare for you,” he said, his words soft, firm.  “So on the off chance that you being freakin’ terrified just now isn’t just a figment of our imaginations, I’m going to do my best to make this easier for the both of us until we figure this out. I hid the guns,” he said.  “I’m gonna lock the door. Go to sleep, Connor.” He patted Connor’s knee and got back to his feet. “We got work to do in the...”

Hank trailed off, staring intently at Sumo’s sleeping form.  He rubbed his eyes and squinted harder. “Christ,” he muttered.  Connor squinted with him, finally registering what it was that Hank had spotted.  “Is that a fucking mouse on his back?”

“Oh, that’s-- that’s an android,” Connor explained, sheepishly moving to rescue the little thing from Sumo’s fur.  It squeaked in protest. Hank flinched when Connor presented it to him, simultaneously repulsed and intrigued.

“An android mouse?” he asked.  “They make those?”

“This model didn’t sell very well,” Connor replied, letting the mouse nestle on his shoulder.  Hank loured. “I found it in a secondhand shop downtown. Its tail was broken, so I bought it and fixed it up.  I tried to let it go after that, but it didn’t want to leave.”

Hank regarded the rodent with open suspicion.  The rodent regarded him back. “That’s the tiniest LED I’ve ever seen,” he muttered.

“I left it sleeping with the stuff I left in the kitchen,” Connor continued, frowning at the mouse.  “Did you wake it up?”

“Uh, no?” said Hank.  “I never saw the thing until just now.” 

Connor’s frown deepened.  “It was supposed to stay asleep.”

Hank huffed a laugh.  “Figures.”

“What?”

“I just think it suits you,” he chuckled.  “An android that follows you everywhere and never does what you say.  About time someone gave you a taste of your own medicine.”

“Very funny, Hank.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Hank yawned.  “Listen, just keep it away from my wires and out of my walls, got it?  Did you name it?”

Connor blinked at Hank, and then at the mouse.  “Should I?” 

“Up to you,” said Hank, lumbering towards his bedroom.  “It’s kinda what you do with pets, though. Night, Connor.”

“Goodnight,” Connor called after him, though he kept his attention on the mouse.  “Do you want a name?” he asked, resuming his seat.

The mouse gave him no distinct answer.

“And who woke you up?” Connor questioned it.  “Did you wake up by yourself? Are you broken, or are you…”

Absently, the mouse began to nibble on his shirt.  Connor was sure it hadn’t been programmed to do that.

“I’m going back to sleep,” he told it.  “When I wake up, I’ll think up a good name for you.  In the meantime, please don’t get into trouble.” As he laid back down, the mouse found a cozy seat on Connor’s chest, right above his thirium pump.  It fell asleep just before Connor did. 

Connor found his dreams right where he’d left them.  There was a gun in his hand and a smile on his face.

“You were lucky,” said Hank, unharmed.  “The next shot would have killed you.” 


End file.
